My amazing days in Singapore

If you are walking into the City Harvest Church in Singapore, I’d suggest that you hold on to your hat. What you are about to see, hear and experience is a church service that may differ from anything you have ever experienced before.  It is neither quiet, limited within a usual church timeline, or low-key.

City Harvest is an amalgamation of ingredients, both historic and contemporary, synthesized into high-energy worship, deafening at times and quiet as a mouse in others, in an auditorium filled with younger Singaporeans who exhibit a remarkable sense of community. This church, founded three decades ago by a young Singaporean convert and his wife, has exploded into a city church today with weekly attendance of 21,000 that continues to grow mainly by new conversions.

This has not come easily. Pain and suffering are woven into its warp and woof. Pastors Kong Hee and Sun Ho went through a deep valley over a legal issue which, while now behind them, continues to influence their own sense of calling and leadership.

I was a speaker at City Harvest’s Global Pentecostal Summit: Voices Loud and Clear, a four-day gathering of 23 Pentecostal scholars, teachers, and writers, designed to introduce the congregation to their work. This came from Pastor Kong’s organizing plan, which involves deepening the congregation’s theological formation and biblical understanding as an essential part of their ministry and witness in their city and beyond.

Take a seat and plan to stay for a while
One must not be in a hurry. Services are up to two and a half hours long. The auditorium is physically formatted with a stage and audio speakers like what one might see at a rock concert. High-energy music is interspersed with testimony, updates on mission work to the poor, endearing children singing groups, and creative and professional interpretive dance. This integration of sounds, congregational singing, praying, and preaching inexorably guides one into worship and praise, articulated with messages of explicit grace.

I introduce you to this church because we need to see what is unfolding in cities around the world. As a local congregation, City Harvest’s organizational pattern was influenced by the Yoido Full Gospel Church founded in Seoul, South Korea by David Yonggi Cho, even though City Harvest’s indigenous nature reflects its own people and culture. Singapore, a modest-size city by global standards, is tucked into the end of the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is spectacular in architecture, dynamic and influential in global business enterprises, and inhabited by a very young population.

Being at the Summit
The Summit, held throughout the day for 1000 selected church members, was attended by 8,000 in the evening. I was struck by the passion and intentionality. Being connected to this spiritual community really seems to matter to people. Their sincerity and enthusiasm were contagious. At the conclusion there was prayer for individuals, which for me, had a spiritual tangibility to it, a conscious awareness of God meeting people in their need, something often lost in our perfunctory church services. It would be hard not to conclude that the God of creation is alive and active in this place.

While most of us in the West see diminishing participation in public worship, parts of the Majority World are experiencing stunning church growth. Younger generations are receptive to, indeed eager for, spiritual communities that combine, in trinitarian form, the Father’s love, the Son’s forgiveness and conscious empowerment by the Holy Spirit.

This is an unmistakably Pentecostal church. Unapologetically, they engage as one in congregational glossolalia, loudly and for extended periods of time. Even though I was raised in the front pews of Pentecostal churches on the Canadian prairies, this was new to me.

When a friend heard about this summit of Pentecostal scholars, he commented that it sounded like an oxymoron. I smiled. I know Pentecostals don’t have much history of doing scholarship, but in recent decades, theological reflection on pneumatology (the theology of the Holy Spirit) has helped the wider church understand more of the Spirit’s person and work. However, this summit was not particularly about the Holy Spirit. Although the teachers and writers who participated are all rooted in Pentecostal communities, we spoke on a variety of subjects: leadership, prayer, contemporary technology, ministry to children.

Reflections as I wait
As I wait for my visa so that I can travel from Singapore to Papua New Guinea—two worlds as distinct from each other as one can imagine—I’m struck by a few elements that became plain to me over these days.

First, the age of megachurches may have peaked, but it is not going away. I’m aware of difficulties associated with megachurches, but it would be nitpicking to conclude that such problems negate the model that has provided, in many cases, needed service to congregants and communities.

Second, the enormous growth of the church in recent decades has created spiritual insufficiencies, commonly described by the phrase “a mile wide and an inch deep.” In our proclivity to wrap ourselves up in contemporary music, precise worship planning, and multimedia resources, it sometimes appears as if we are simply aping the local culture, veneered by superficiality. What should we do? I give credit to City Harvest for drawing people into theological paradigms that enable a deepening of faith, rooted in Scripture and made alive by a commitment to celebrating Christ and welcoming the Spirit in worship. In short, I saw a focused discipleship effort, wrapped in a Pentecostal format but applicable to any church.

My visit to City Harvest was deeply inspiring. The setting, style, and manner of worship certainly aren’t for everyone. Even I, an open-minded Pentecostal, am still drawn to the old Pentecostal hymns on which I was raised. But I experienced an overwhelming passion for Christ at City Harvest. I saw their extraordinary concern for the poor and homeless, their desire to envelop the mentally and physically challenged with special ministries, and their remarkable attention to children’s learning.

There were times when I metaphorically grabbed for my hat, but then I saw the wider landscape of God at work among these people, in this place, who are alive to God’s promises and calling fervently for the Spirit’s empowerment to make Jesus known to their world and beyond.

In the end, why not just leave your hat where it is.

Brian C. Stiller
Global Ambassador
November 2023