Once in two years, we organise a church camp to bring everyone together for an extended time of learning God’s Word and fellowshipping through discussions, meals and play. Yes, the resort and facilities are important because they cater to our physical needs. Yes, the speaker is important because we will be sitting at his feet, hearing the voice of God through the sermons that he preaches. Yes, the company is also very important because some will feel awkward or even stressed having to interact with unfamiliar people. Well, through the enthusiastic publicity that the camp committee has pushed out, the venue seems very inviting. I can assure you that the speaker, Dr Tan Kim Huat, is a good communicator and we will learn much from him. He was one of our past Easter Convention Speakers. He was also my New Testament Lecturer while I was studying in Trinity Theological College. As for company, gather some kakis and sign up together for the church camp. Better still, venture out to meet new people and develop new friendships. Church camp is a very good platform for you to get to know people. If you are relatively new to us, I would strongly urge you to attend the church camp because this is a very good way for you to assimilate into the community.

The theme for this year’s camp is taken from 1 John 4.19: “We love because he first loved us.” How did the leadership arrive at this theme? Well, recall that our mission statement is ‘Love God*Make disciples’. Since 2010, we have been focusing on different aspects of making disciples – being a welcoming church, walking across the room, nurturing the faith of every worshipper.  We haven’t said very much about loving God. Actually, it is out of our love for God that we want to obey his Great Commission to make disciples. But the starting point should not even be our love for God. The starting point is God’s love for us. Only when we understand this truth will we then be able to respond to his love. How should we respond to God’s amazing love? The theme tells us that we ought to respond in love – loving God and also loving others as we love ourselves. These two ways of loving are inseparable. We cannot say that we love God and yet hate our fellowmen. The apostle John called such people liars. Likewise, we cannot truly love our fellowmen if we do not have the love of God in our hearts. We obey the Great Commission out of our love for God. We also obey the Great Commission out of our love for people. We engage and evangelise the lost because we love them and do not want them to be lost in eternity. We establish and equip the saved in order to build them up in their faith, again out of our love for them. Such disciple-making efforts would require a lot of time, patience and sacrifice. Without love, we will not be able to remain steadfast in this endeavour.

In the second half of the year, we will be studying the epistles of John – 1, 2, & 3 John. In these letters, love is a major theme. By coming together for the church camp, we will have a good overview of God’s love for us and our love for him and for one another. This will pave the way for these themes to be reinforced when we preach through John’s letters and when we embark on the second common curriculum of the year where the DGs will study 1 John. You can be very certain that by the end of the year, you will not only have a good grasp of John’s letters but more importantly, as the Word of God is taught and learnt, our hearts will begin to change and our lives transformed to one that demonstrates that kind of love where people will straight away know that we are Jesus’ disciples.

Love is used so flippantly nowadays that it has become such a cliché but it is not meant to be like this. God is Trinity and in the community of the Godhead, love is shared. So when we are made in God’s image, we are made to love. God has vividly demonstrated to us his amazing love through the death of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, for the atonement of our sins. As Jesus has shown us sacrificial and unconditional love, he commanded us to do the same to one another. Jesus encapsulated all the commandments in the Bible into two commands and both have to do with love. The first component of the fruit of the Spirit is love. Although 1 Corinthians 13 describes the different characteristics of love, love knows no bounds because there are so many ways we can demonstrate love. Let us do so as the Spirit leads us. Faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. Have I not listed down enough evidence to persuade you to know love and to practise love?

Whilst the mission statement is ‘Love God*Make disciples’, the focus for 2016 & 2017 is ‘Building Community Within; Engaging Community Without’. The leadership and pastors are committed to build all of you up in your faith. We want to build you up in your biblical convictions (through the pulpit ministry, the Bible studies we conduct in the DGs, and other Christian Education courses that we offer). We want to build you up by equipping you with skills so that you can be competent in doing kingdom’s work. We also want to build you up in Christ-like character. Preaching & teaching should transform the mind and a transformed mind should lead to a transformed life but sometimes we slack and that is why it is good to have a group of people that will hold us accountable. The DG can be that group. We want to build you up in love. We want to see the community coming alongside each other to support one another, bear each other’s burdens and speak truths into each other’s lives. That is why somewhere in the middle of the year, we are going to have a series of messages on ‘Community’ and right smack in this series of messages we will have our church camp to reinforce the importance of ‘Building Community Within’. This first part of the focus is nothing new. It encompasses being a welcoming church, walking across the room and nurturing the faith of worshippers. It is to consolidate what we have been doing these past years.

The latter half of the focus is something relatively new – ‘Engaging Community Without’. It is not that we haven’t been doing this but we want to do more. We ask: “Should TWPC-EC disappear from the face of Queenstown, will we be missed?” For us to engage the community without, love again will have to be our basis and motivation. It is God’s love that should compel us to care for the poor, reach out to the needy, and make ourselves relevant as salt and light for Jesus in this part of Singapore that God has placed us. If we cannot engage them at this level, how can we expect to share the Gospel with them? At the present moment, we are giving tuition to the kids staying in the vicinity. We hope to expand the tuition ministry, exploring the possibility of offering tuition up to twice a week. This is a good platform for us not only to engage the children but also their parents. We also plan to give out scholarships to needy students in the nearby schools. We intend to search out more areas where we can play our part in contributing to the welfare of the Queenstown Community.

There you are – behind all that we do as a church, love must be the undergirding factor. We need to exercise love but more importantly we need to first of all understand and appreciate the supernatural love that God has shown us in Christ. Only then will we be able to act as his channel of blessing, allowing his love to overflow from us to those around, for his pleasure and for his glory. Indeed, we love because he first loved us!