1. What is the motivating factor in starting Risen Christian Assembly (RCA)?
It was 2016, Rev Dominic Yeo, Lead Pastor of Trinity Christian Centre had a vision of planting five AG churches in Singapore and he challenged the pastoral team to pray and seek God if we would step out in faith to heed the challenge. I prayed and felt the call to take up the challenge of planting a church. This was also in line with what the Lord had laid upon my heart many years ago to evangelize and make disciples of this nation. There is also a need to plant more churches in Singapore because from statistics, only one in 10 Singaporeans know the Lord. There is definitely room for more churches to reach more people for the Lord. With pastoral covering, help from Trinity Christian Centre, a sense of calling and a need for more churches, four bi-vocational pastors, 75 laity and I, a total of 80 people, stepped out in faith in 2018 and planted Risen Christian Assembly.
2. What strategies or approaches did you use?
Prayer is key to the growth of RCA. We started Daily Revival Prayer Meeting, praying every day in church since September 2018. Prayer laid the foundation and opened doors for the work of outreach. Since COVID-19, we switched it to online prayer and later it became Weekly Revival Prayer Meetings.
We mainly focus on friendship evangelism. We encourage every Risenite to do three things; IMF – to invite, mentor and be a friend to someone.
We set up a ministry called the Watchmen Ministry. It’s a ministry specializing in following up on newcomers. The Watchmen will do initial home visits and thereafter call them once a month to pray for them. They will keep in touch with the newcomers until they come to church regularly and are ready to join a cell group. We have also reached the community near our church through the Makan Kakis program, a food and fun program organized by our social arm, Arise Community Services. We invited the clients to church, got them saved and they started attending church regularly. Now they are the members of our Chinese Congregation that we started in September 2022.
3. What was one of the toughest challenges you encountered? How did God and your team resolve this?
The toughest challenge was to see people leave the ministry. Many felt the church could not meet their needs, for example, their children’s needs. Some had a different expectation of what a church plant was and when their expectations were not met, they decided to leave. Some didn’t expect church plant to be such hard work and couldn’t cope with the demands and so left. Others left for other reasons. But many were clearly not ready for the work and the spiritual warfare they had to face in planting a church. There was nothing I could do to stop them from leaving. We had to let go, move on and trust God to provide the human and financial resources needed to keep ploughing the land. To date, the church has grown, God has sent new people to us and many new souls are saved and nurtured. We cannot look back; we can only press on and look forward for the new things God will do.
Another challenge is to provide a full-service church. To do that, there is a manpower crunch. To meet the needs of the church, many Risenites helm more than one ministry. To plant a church in Singapore, it requires more than providing a singular ministry, for example only adults or only youths. We need a team of pastors and leaders to helm different ministries to meet the needs of the whole family, so it has to be multi-prong ministries. There cannot be age-group gaps in the ministry, or we could lose the young people if a certain age group is not catered for. As the ministry grew, we added Infant Ministry, Pre-Teens, Youth and Young Adult groups to cater to the needs of a growing church. In September 2022, we started the Chinese Service to minister to the Chinese-speaking folks as well.
Another challenge is to provide quality ministry. Standards are high in Singapore; people do expect good quality service experience. So, for the last few years, I’ve been mentoring pastors to preach, engaged a consultant to train our worship team and worked on a quality welcome team so people encounter God, receive good spiritual food and feel loved in our church. Many have testified of the strong presence of God, anointed preaching and a caring community.
4. One advice to give to someone who wants to explore church planting.
You need to be spiritually, physically and emotionally ready for the task. It is not going to be easy. You need to have a strong team to help you, you cannot work alone. You need a minimum number to build momentum, I would say at least 80 people to form your first congregation. You need a mother church or a consultant to come alongside to help navigate the journey with you.
