Easter 2022: New Year, New Church?

Wrestling with the option of joining a church plant

Apr 17, 2022

Easter 2021 marked a bit of a transition for Grace and me. For over a year, despite living in Singapore (the whole time for Grace, about half the time for me), we had been fully engaged and a part of City on a Hill (CoaH) Somerville, our church back in the Boston area. Both our mini community groups (“micro groups”) and the Sunday services were over Zoom (and interactive!); in a sense, we were as much a part of the community as many others in the congregation who hadn’t been coming to in-person services before getting vaccinated.

But then on Easter, they switched off Zoom, moving to an outdoor setting, more or less on another church’s front lawn. So we decided this would be a good time to start watching the livestream of the church we’d planned all along to transition to attending, Redemption Hill Church here in Singapore.

A couple months later, as widespread vaccination spread in the US, CoaH transitioned to a more typical community group structure and our micro groups came to an end. We checked out an RHC community group near where we live, instantly bonding and making our closest friends in the church. Then when services resumed in person, we started attending on Sundays as well. I (and occasionally Grace) kept tuning into the CoaH Zoom gatherings through the end of the year, but by the fall, we were also fully integrated into community at RHC.

From the beginning, we also heard a lot about two new church plants coming out of RHC in the near future. One would be specifically focused on Mandarin speakers, so for a while was called the “Mandarin Church Plant” before adopting the Chinese name En Ling, which means “grace.” The second, like the flagship, would be English-speaking, so to distinguish the two, has become known as the “English Church Plant” or “ECP” in the classic Singaporean style of 3-letter acronyms (not to be confused with the East Coast Park!).

We were immediately interested in hearing more about the ECP given our own history at City on a Hill, which while being a similar age to RHC, had a much more robust church planting culture. I wrote about this culture in more detail nearly five years ago, but I still vividly remember the bittersweet feeling when half of the friends I made at CoaH in my first year joined that first church plant, which we sent out to South Boston just three years after CoaH was planted itself.

The year after writing that post, we transitioned to a different model: Instead of planting independent churches and breaking those bonds of fellowship, we would instead add more churches under the City on a Hill name, maintaining a closer degree of connection but with separate preaching, community groups, and so on. Now up to four locations, we share resources like pastors or worship leaders, support missionary organizations jointly, and come together for yearly retreats, but are otherwise independent.

And we joined the first such church, a mix of a plant and a merger with another congregation in Somerville. In some ways, it wasn’t really a choice — as one of the two community groups who met “north of the (Charles) river,” we were actively nudged to at least try it out. We got to do that as a community group, discussing amongst ourselves at CG and eventually making the joint decision to go together. It was a uniquely awesome experience — most of the time, you’re checking out churches alone or as a family, but we got to do it as a community.

Why is City on a Hill so into church planting? Part of it, of course, is the church’s vision of church planting as the way to reach people where they’re at. But another part is the particular culture of Boston, with its mix of low car ownership and only-good-by-US-standards public transportation. One way I’ve heard it phrased is that Bostonians don’t like to take multiple subway lines to get places, so the only location that could support a large church is where they intersect downtown. Naturally, that’s where the biggest church in the city is, the historic yet still thriving Park Street Church. To reach everywhere else, the CoaH vision says, small neighborhood churches are the way to go.

So that’s the context we came into the announcements of upcoming church plants with. Our membership interview just so happened to be with Andrew “Purch” Purchase, who we would later find out is the lead pastor of the ECP. After spending most of the time sharing our testimonies we asked him plenty of questions leading in that direction.

Why start this church plant? This was the natural first question Purch addressed in the first Zoom info session. He gave some theological reasons, and also mentioned studies saying that church plants tend to see more people come to faith, “conversion growth” as opposed to the “transfer growth” RHC has seen a lot of during the pandemic.

At a second visit after the announcement, I grilled him more on how his vision for the church plant would differ from the flagship. He mentioned wanting to see more “stickiness” after the gathering, with people actually forming community, meeting new people, and so on. “We’ve already gathered everyone in one place for the service — why are we letting that opportunity for fellowship go to waste?”

That resonated with us, as it’s been a common thing we’ve come to value in churches we attend for precisely that reason. At the same time, though, it’s also something that we’ve found at RHC itself. As I extolled in more detail a month ago, our community group has grown closer together by getting lunch after the service every Sunday, giving us that second weekly touchpoint of connection. In other words, we already have the “stickiness” Purch described — but our group is fairly unique in that respect; it certainly isn’t common church-wide.

And that community is also by far our biggest hesitation. A couple months ago, the ECP had its first service / info session, which we attended at the same time as RHC’s third congregation. This gave us enough time to eat a quick lunch with our CG beforehand, which is also was when we realized, honestly to our surprise, that we were the only ones from our CG interested in the church plant.

Despite that lack of enthusiasm from those we know best, the info session had about 100 people. In one of the activities, we were given the opportunity to respond to a series of questions and see our answers on the screen. To the question, “Where would like to see the ECP in five years?” I responded with something like “already having 2-3 more churches planted out of it,” which drew some gasps.

But I was serious — RHC is way behind the curve with respect to planting churches, and, well, if anyone is going to have that interest, it’s going to be the people interested in this first church plant. While we didn’t know many people besides Purch, I wanted to at least nudge everyone else to stepping even more out in faith.

That brings us to today, Easter Sunday, when the ECP held its first standalone gathering. En Ling had split off for Good Friday, and partly because we got to see our community group at the RHC Good Friday service, we decided to attend the ECP’s Easter gathering.

When we entered, we were greeted by a classic pull-up banner saying “You’ve come to the right place.” Phew, I thought. We had only guessed that we needed to go up to the ballrooms on the sixth floor! They then had a stylized a map of Singapore for us to place stickers to describe where we live. We were somewhat surprised to see stickers on basically the entire island (well, the residential portions), and somewhat disappointed to see a blank spot on the map where our home is (only slightly, though, as it was very minimally labeled).

We then used sticky notes as makeshift nametags color-coded by the area we live in, so as to give us a sense of who we might live near and help us strike up conversations that way. It worked, as nametags often do; several people commented that they wished people wore nametags like that all the time.

Before the service started, we chatted with one American family that we had sat next to in the RHC service a few months ago. They were similarly uncommitted, but thought they might be in a good position to join a church plant, having just arrived six months ago. They shared our hesitation, that they would be leaving the people they had grown close to in that time, their community group.

In the service itself, we ended up sitting near a younger dating couple who I’d met at the RHC service last week, and chatted a bit more with them directly after the service. After grabbing our hot cross buns, we joined a cocktail table set up in the foyer to talk with their community group, and ended up having lunch together with them in the nearby mall food court. That was cool; a similar sort of encounter in early March 2020 had been part of why we settled on RHC in the first place, so that was a good sign.

So, what did we think overall? As I reflected on the way home, and shared with Grace afterwards, this church plant reminded me of medieval paintings of baby Jesus, which often portrayed him as an old man.

madonna child berlinghiero — *Madonna and Child* by Berlinghiero, 1230s. Source

The story goes that depicting Jesus as a baby would have made him seem useless and particularly uninspiring for Christians to pray to. So they drew him as basically a miniature adult, which would somehow make him worthy of worship.

In the same way, this church plant seemed like it had everything all together from the get-go. The worship band featured six or seven high-quality musicians. Purch’s Easter sermon, on Romans 8:31-39, could just as easily have been preached at the flagship. There was a full kids ministry, up to 12 years old, complete with pull-up banners indicating which doors to use.

Sure, there was some high-pitched feedback once during the worship, and Grace noticed that the Scripture bled over the right-hand margin of the slides, but those super minor errors weren’t acknowledged from the stage. If you were just visiting for the first time and ignored the “English Church Plant” signs, you might think that this church had been around for years.

And to be honest, I felt a similar sort of discomfort to how many of us feel when seeing the medieval depictions of baby Jesus. After all, babies are supposed to look different from miniature adults for precisely the reason medieval artists didn’t want Jesus to — they need to be cute so that we feel an urge to care for them. (This is the same instinct that pets hijack, but that’s a whole other subject.)

In the same way, church plants like the ones we’d experienced at CoaH quite intentionally bring added urgency. Just like babies need a lot of care, new churches usually need a lot of volunteers to step up and serve. And as churches like CoaH find, the process of sending out dedicated, serving members to plant new churches also leaves many holes behind for those who aren’t going to step up and fill.

Student-led ministries often bring about a similar dynamic, as older students step into far greater leadership responsibilities than they will likely be asked to take on for the next decade following graduation in the churches they join. It’s why so many of us thrived there — we rose to the challenge presented by the need for student leadership.

That level of urgency was, frankly, absent at the gathering today. One slide in the announcements section gave a QR code to a link to sign up to serve, but we were also actively told that we don’t need to. They have everything under control already, or at least that was the impression we were given.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with being well-organized or having a kids ministry. I don’t say any of this to diminish the massive amount of work done behind the scenes to make this first service go so smoothly. It just didn’t feel like a church plant, in the very ways that I suspect facilitate the greater zeal for evangelism researchers observe.

I’m sure that Purch and the other leaders did a lot of soul searching to discern whether they should be stepping up to lead the ECP. It’s qualitatively different for them. But the way they’ve presented it to everyone else is basically for us to decide as consumers. The ECP isn’t set up to be the sort of church plant that asks a lot of its attendees — it’s just going to be another well-run church gathering with slightly different people in a slightly different part of the city.

Speaking of which, I should also say a bit more about the location. Even in our membership conversation, Purch had hinted that they had chosen the location to be in our direction, because we’re in the part of the island that has experienced the most recent population growth. We’ve certainly seen that growth first-hand, both in the massive apartment construction projects I noticed upon my first visit back in 2015 and with how crowded the subway is these days.

Speaking of which, this Google Maps overlay shows the Singapore subway lines by their colors, to which I’ve added four black circles. The northernmost is our home near the Buangkok MRT station on the Northeast (purple) line. The southernmost is RHC’s current location in Chinatown, which takes us about 40-45 minutes to get to; it’s nice for it to be a straight shot down the Northeast line, even if it is a lot of stops and we never get a seat.

The two middle locations are the current, transitional location of the ECP, near the Farrer Park station on the Northeast (purple) line, and the eventual final location near the Tai Seng station on the Circle (yellow) line. There have been some supply-chain-related construction delays, with possibly more to come as China’s Zero COVID policy wreaks havoc, but we’re still hoping the planned location will be ready by the end of the year.

Given this map, it’s clear that the ECP is indeed coming “closer” to us, even if it will involve an extra change in subway line to get to Tai Seng. It does seem like a compromise location on the bridge between the east and northeast “fingers” of Singapore. So if the idea behind the church plant is to establish an “RHC East/Northeast”, then it would make a lot of sense for us to join it.

But given the wide geographic spread of where people are coming from, such a division doesn’t really seem to be the intent. For us individually, it doesn’t particularly matter if our commute to church is 35 or 45 minutes. But as current CG hosts and potentially leaders in the future, it’s a much bigger deal where the people who live close to us are going. And that brings me back to a mystery I’ve puzzled with for a while now.

The Sengkang GRC, the political unit roughly corresponding to the areas served by that grey-colored light rail loop near our home on the map above, has about 4% of the population of Singapore. RHC has about 1000 members. So if people’s locations were evenly distributed across the island, we would expect to see a total of 40 members in the Sengkang GRC. But we only know one other couple who lives near us, not counting our CG leaders, who moved away in the last year.

And that’s even including our community group, which meets at our house in the Sengkang area! The vast majority of our group lives elsewhere, often either further away in Punggol or Pasir Ris or closer into the city in Hougang or Serangoon. While we obviously welcome everyone who comes into the group, it’s not the geographically-defined sort of partition we’d been expecting.

And indeed, today, despite the nametags, we weren’t able to meet anyone at the ECP who lives in Sengkang, either. The group we joined for lunch meets near Serangoon, which is the intersection of the Circle (yellow) and Northeast (purple) lines three stops away from us, and that counted as the “Northeast” for nametag purposes.

Are there other similarly-minded churches closer to us that Sengkang Christians might be attending? Gospel Light, the other church we checked out back in 2020, is in the Punggol area, but actually isn’t much more convenient for us; we have to take a bus and walk a bit. There’s a Mormon church — Mormons seem to be intentional about building their churches in residential areas. But that’s about it.

It’s true that within Sengkang, our apartment is about as convenient as you can get for taking the MRT into the city. Taking the light rail and then the subway (“LRT to MRT” as we say) might be a bit too inconvenient for folks in other parts of Sengkang. Maybe most of them just go to Gospel Light.

So how should we decide which to attend? Fortunately, we have a while to make that decision. The ECP will be meeting just once a month in its current location over the next five months. They’re trying to build community in other ways, of course, and we signed ourselves up to host dinner, in case there are others we haven’t met yet in the Sengkang area.

But to be honest, it’ll take a lot for us to leave the community we’ve made. We’re still open if there end up being a lot more people we didn’t happen to meet in the Sengkang area looking for a community group, or if a decent chunk of our community group is at least open to joining us there — we’re certainly big enough by now that splitting in two could make sense. But if we’re the only ones leaving, it really doesn’t, as much as we resonate with the vision and location.

At one point, I imagined us attending the ECP while continuing with the same community group. But with lunch after church on Sundays as such an integral part of that group, we’d really be reducing ourselves to halfway-in, halfway-out. We’ve done enough double-dipping recently, it’s time to be fully present in one place. The only question is where.

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