Our church has gone through numerous changes during my 12 years here. Looking back, I was almost always oppose to those changes, sometimes very strongly.

I remember the first change that I experienced was the change of church meeting from Friday night to Sunday morning, my main argument was there were people coming to Friday service whom also go other churches (a few of IPC people for example) – if we move the service, we would lose these people. Looking back now, that was a weak argument, it’d actually be better if people just committed to one church.

And then the biggest change of all and perhaps the hardest for me was the splitting of FOCUS to different fellowships. I think it was done one at time, the Cantonese was being broken off first. I just didn’t like the breaking of the bond that have been developed by FOCUS people then. And also I was skeptical that people want to join a church made of people from their own country. One of my reasons on joining FOCUS was its international nature – I mean I didn’t want to come all the way to Australia to mingle with Indonesians. I was proven wrong of course (thank God) and the separate groups each grow, if we haven’t split such grow might not happen (yes of course it’s all under God’s plan).

I also thought changing the name of IBF to Pelita was unnecessary. Again same argument as above, I thought our difference is to the fact that we use English in our name, our service, our bibles etc, I thought this would attract Indo people more, surely they want to improve their English? But under God’s grace, I was proven wrong again, the number of people attending Pelita was growing eventhough we become more and more Indonesianised.

So what’s the point of this post? Well, it just shows that I am uncomfortable with changes, sometimes for selfish reasons. Perhaps I also wasn’t trusting or gave enough credit to the leadership team. Perhaps I wasn’t trusting God and trusted my logic instead. God has blessed the ministry of FOCUS (and UniChurch), none of those changes (that I know of) had detrimental effect to the church.

So next time a change come around, I would probably still end up disliking it 🙂 But I will learn to trust God in whatever changes.