A few slept, some felt challenged, some thought it was informative, some had questions, most just listened and sized up the where and the what, and the shape of things to come in PJEFC.

I only wished that all had turned up for Membership 101. Six opportunities and yet many chose not to attend. 368 out of an average Sunday attendance of 580—that’s a poor 63%. OK. Never mind. We soldier on.

One of the highlights was the history lesson by Lai Sheong on the origins of the Evangelical Free Church movement in Europe, and how that shaped the distinctives that we hold dear today, such as being autonomous, evangelical and mission oriented. The movement spread from Europe to North America and then to other parts of the world, including Malaysia. Interestingly, EFC of America was only formed in 1950 and by 1963 it had reached the shores of Malaysia. In 1966 PJEFC was founded.

PJEFC’s story was told to us through a video presentation, put together for us by Leon Lai, Shin Ee and Li Ming. It has given us a better understanding of the church’s sometimes exciting-sometimes difficult journey over the last 42 years. But what’s more important, I hope you realise that you are, right now, playing a part in writing PJEFC’s history (at least from 2008 onwards). What it will be from hindsight depends on what you and I do today!

Apart from history we also talked about the Vision and Plans for the next 12 years. I am going to put aside reiterating Vision 2020 for the moment as I have decided to tweak it a bit for an even more focussed direction.

Let me highlight, for the benefit of those who didn’t attend the class, the immediate plans for the next four years (Phase 1: 2009-2012). One major area of focus will be Outward. That is to say, we want to make intentional, concerted efforts to reach out to people through evangelism, community services and cross-cultural missions.

There may be many people and many groups that we are to reach, but there’s one group we must give immediate priority focus—and they’re the UTAR students. As I told the class, we don’t need to fast and pray about whether we should reach out to them or not. It is a given! They are right at our doorstep! If we don’t do anything, one day the Lord will call us to account for failing to fulfil our call. I’m sorry if I sound a little selfish here, but I will be first in line, and I don’t want to face the Lord knowing that we have shirked our responsibility!

I want to thank people like CY Choo, Khiam Khoon, KC Leong, Li Cheng, Khee Joo, Swee Ho and Richard Khor who have been doing this for the last few years. My apologies to them, that the church has not been behind them enough. We need to be. We need to get a bigger team together, to be intentional, to organise more bridge-building programmes to connect with the UTAR community.

We don’t know how long we have. Many of the faculties have already moved to the Kampar campus. Nonetheless, we believe that there will still be a need for a PJ campus. While we have a window of opportunity, we must seize it. Furthermore, each student is only going to be here for, at most, three years. We need to reach them before we lose the opportunity to do so.

What can you do?

Pr Aaron has been tasked to drive this. Talk to him.

PrSH