What do you plan to do after retirement?

17 August 2020 Leave a comment

What will you do after retirement? I am beginning to get more questions like this. Maybe it is because I announced it officially on our 48th church anniversary service, and I have talked about this with friends for some time now.

It is not an easy question to answer. It is not easy because I really do not have any plans. And I usually would have some plans. After all, I am Singaporean. Not this time though. I am determined to leave God with a blank page and let Him fill it at His divine pleasure and leisure. When I last thought of quitting, I had a logical plan of what I will do in the next chapter of my life albeit in broad strokes. It is unlike me to have to say, No I have no plans. I am going to give God a blank page, wait on Him, and let Him fill it at His leisure. I will wait patiently on God. “For You alone O Lord my soul waits in silence, from Him is my salvation” (Ps 62.1).

I don’t want to be thought of as irresponsible or over-spiritual or impractical – so heavenly minded that I am of no earthly use. It’s my pride, I suppose. I want to look good, smart and responsible – a good and faithful steward. If I had a sensible and inspiring five year plan to rattle off in an elevator speech – people would think, He really thought it through. He is so thorough. They would envy me. To say, I have no plans except to rest and wait till the Lord add to my empty plate at His leisure, is risky. My church friends and colleagues will say, When are you going to help us? We need you to fill this gap and that gap! This is tough – to be not helping when my help is needed. To even be misunderstood by my own church colleagues and friends, if God is silent for a long time. What if the pages remain blank for months? I don’t want to be forgotten. I don’t want to be seen as unhelpful. Lord help me to say, “No I have no plans”, when people ask me THAT question. Give me Your grace and power.

This is not a retirement rule for all believers but it is for me because God is inviting me to live this way – without a certain and sure plan. It could be called the Abrahamic plan. Maybe for you, a detailed or rough plan is a necessity and that may be His intention for you. Not for me this time round. We are all unique, and are all developing in different areas of our life, and God is moving us towards wholeness in different ways. For me trusting God’s providence with my future, without any visible regular support or ministry plans is what God wants to develop in me. In a pastorate, this was an issue in the beginning – the need for faith for finances. But this has not been the case since my children graduated and went on to have jobs. The acute need for finances has ceased for many years.

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Retirement pangs

3 August 2020 2 Comments



To reflect on 40 years of ministry takes considerable time and courage. It is a lengthy period of ministry in the only church that I have been committed to since I gave my life to Christ. It cannot be done in a day. That may be too intense and unfruitful. It needs to be done by the unforced rhythms of grace. The Spirit initiates and you attend to the memories and emotions that arise from such precious, and sometimes painful moments. It takes courage to face the fact that many mistakes had been made. Errors in methodology, in decisions, in policy making, in self-sufficiency, in motivation and in dealing with people and yourself. I wish I could go back in time and redo those days with the knowledge, experience and maturity I now have. However that is impossible and all you are left with are past failures and regrets that cannot be undone. I have to remind myself to be gentle with myself. After all God has forgiven and covered all these failures with His precious Son’s blood. When I shared this with my 3-2-1 group, Dr Jimmy Tan mentioned a quotation of St Augustine that consoled me. It went this way:

Trust the past to the mercy of God, the present to His love, and the future to His providence. St Augustine

It is consoling to know God’s mercy covers my failures and faults in the 40 years of ministry in the church. Despite the fact that members may have suffered the consequences of those decisions and policies and my weaknesses, the Lord’s mercy covers them all, and on the day of judgment the Lord will not even raise it up. I was teaching members how to interpret scriptures on zoom recently and one passage was the one about Jesus restoring Peter by the beach. “Peter, do you love me?” Its poignant and significant that Jesus never brought up the fact of Peter’s denial of Christ. It is all forgiven and under the wrap of God’s bloody mercy.

It is also encouraging to know that God’s love will be with me in the present while I wrap up and hand over my responsibilities and handhold those taking over my various duties and roles. The Lord will not discard me like a used tissue paper in the hawker center. He is very close and makes sure all is well with me emotionally. I recall the tenderness with which the Lord handled the home going of Moses. He let him see the promised land from Mt Pisgah. He let him know the bad news that he won’t be leading the people to possess the land, that the task belongs to Joshua his successor. The Lord endearingly called him, my servant, and even buried him personally. To this day, no one knows where Moses was buried.

It is strange to me to entrust the future to God’s providence, being someone who like to have options and plans. I am quite determined this time to give God a blank page for Him to fill in His time. It sounds over spiritual but I will resist using my brains to easily fill up my calendars with goals and plans, but I feel I need to take a step back, and enjoy staring at an empty page and calendar. Trusting in God’s providential care – so that while trying to do the ordinary things of life, like Ruth gleaning in the fields, ended up meeting Boaz, under God’s providential guidance of events and timing. Yes, that will be nice – to experience some of God’s surprises.

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What Tuesdays look like

28 July 2020 Leave a comment

The staff meeting of the week is usually on Tuesdays, unless there is a public holiday. It usually begins around 9.30am and never ends earlier than 12.30pm. We discuss what most staff would discuss. Then its usually a late lunch break for me. After that I would work on action following the meeting if there are important and urgent ones to tackle. And then, nowadays, with Christian Education every Wednesday, I will perfect my draft powerpoint and teaching notes, and send the Powerpoint slides to the CE WhatsApp chat group. This will usually carry on into the night and I quit with a satisfied sigh. Is there such a thing as a “satisfied sigh”? A sigh of relief and satisfaction.

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Christian Education on Zoom

Zoom Christian Education

27 July 2020 Leave a comment

I am currently doing a Zoom Christian Education course on “Interpreting Scriptures” for the church. It will run for 11 sessions and this Wednesday night I would be doing the third session of one-and-a-half hour workshop.

Tom Cannon, one of our pastoral staff, gave the rest of the staff a basic training on how to use Zoom. It was a good orientation. However, I lacked confidence, so I had to practice on my own, some of the functions needed in my workshops: like how to share screen, and how to use the whiteboard. Even then I needed another staff member, Ethel Shin-Cannon to help me with the organization of the rooms, when participants are put in virtual rooms for work on the scripture texts. 

The first session I was too ambitious. I wanted to get past the introduction quickly and crammed all the introductory material in one session. It was too long -two hours. After feedback, and also because there was less content material to cover, the next session was a sweet one-and-a-half hour. I will definitely get more and more comfortable as I get skilled in presenting material online through Zoom. 

I can see a potential in this format that Covid-19 has forced upon the church. Before this, it was almost impossible to imagine members fighting heavy traffic, or after work gulping a quick meal to go to the church premises for Bible studies, and then after that take a one-hour commute home. Now with Zoom, they can comfortably go home, have a meal, and even a shower, and tune into a Zoom meeting. He or she still has to be hungry enough to fight the natural preference to chill after a day’s work (perhaps of staring into a computer), rather than to sign up and show up for a course (again on the computer).  We are just lessening the number of hurdles that he or she has to jump over.

To keep the level of engagement high, the content has to be formatted in such a way that there is interaction, actual practice segment, and more conversational and less lecture like. 

Perhaps it is too early to get over-excited but I suppose with the Covid 19 situation unlikely to improve anytime too soon there will be a need to use technology to build the faith of God’s people. The church staff thinks that even if things return to “normal” we can still reach out to more people for spiritual formation/Christian education courses. So we signed up for annual zoom subscriptions to get a discount on what we are paying currently on a monthly basis.

Welcome to the “new normal” church of tomorrow.

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Learning fast

8 May 2020 Leave a comment

There was no choice. I had to learn fast how to record my sermons.

First, I had to buy the wireless mic, and the adapter cable for the phone. Then I had to recorded my Sunday sermons with my wife’s help and the media team leader’s advice via whatsapp video calls.

My Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is proving to be an asset. Its video is top quality for 5 minutes and 10 minutes for the best settings. But even the third best setting is sufficient to give more than 45 minutes of good quality video for the Sunday online service via YouTube.

It felt stressful to do this. Lots of unknown areas. Lots of experimenting and going back and forth with Zephaniah. Stressful also to talk in front of a phone camera and an empty hall. Had to rehearse the script. Had to remember the main points and ideas. It all adds to the stress.

It was strangely satisfying to see myself on screen. I used to hate to watch videos of myself preaching. Interestingly, it was not as painful this time round watching myself on TV preach to myself in the living room. I am becoming comfortable with the way I appear on video, and I feel immense satisfaction that it was recorded using a Note 9, and desk tripod, and wireless mic.

Of course the media team did a lot of editing. That is something I hope to learn in the near future.

The pandemic has forced this on me and my staff. They too are learning to record their own sermons and sending them to the editing team.

The members are beneficiaries. Shorter, sharper, clearer sermons, and therefore services, every Sunday.

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