Dear brothers and sisters,
We praise God for leading us to be an intentional disciple-making community.
As we look back the years, we discover that God is establishing us as a community with three distinctive characteristics, namely: intentionality, authenticity and being missional.
Intentionality means we take personal ownership of our discipleship walk. We pursue God by tuning our daily lifestyle and adopting spiritual disciplines to cherish and nourish our devotion to Christ, His body and His mandate continually.
Authenticity means we affirm and celebrate God’s design for children, youth, seniors, sexuality, singleness, marriage and family. It also means we are a safe and authentic community; there is no need to wear masks because there is no ranking of sins. We receive each other as God’s masterpieces that are still “work-in-progress”.
Missional means we believe that God has called us to be salt and light in this broken world.
As a disciple-making community, we desire to live missionally for Jesus wherever He places us to be. We desire to express God’s love through community outreach and cross-cultural mission work.
Continuing our journey, the 2016 church theme will be “Joyful Exiles”. We are joyful because we see God’s design as beautiful and not restrictive. We pursue Him intentionally because we delight in Him. We worship and serve Him with gladness of heart. We are exiles because we are not of this world; our citizenship is in heaven. Therefore, we will not become materialistic and worldly-minded. We ought to store up treasures in heaven, fixing our eyes on the “heavenly country” whose architect and builder is God (Heb 11:16).
Our 2016 pulpit will include the study of the book of Philippians (the book of joy); Revelation (on the seven churches); 2 Thessalonians (instructions for living in the last days) and Song of Songs (about joyful devotion). In addition, we will have our annual God’s design series to root us in God’s blueprint for our lives. Finally, we will have our usual topical messages scattered across the pulpit calendar to address timely issues.
May the Lord lead us to grow in intentionality, authenticity and being missional as a community of Christ. May He lead us to live as joyful sojourners on this temporal earth and to be His holy priesthood to this fallen world.
bonded to Him,
Rick Toh , Lead Pastor (YCKC Bulletin 2&3 January 2016)