On Young, New Christians

The Christian Fellowship in my NS camp is approximately 15 people strong. At the beginning I was quite surprised to discover that quite a number of them were very new Christians. Some had only been converts for a few years, and there was even one who got converted just before entering camp.

As time wore on, however, I grew quite disappointed seeing their response toward the pastor's sermons as well as their lack of participation in terms of song leading and speaking up. Note that I am NOT used to being the most active member in any given fellowship. But as I felt that everyone else just wasn't really up to it (I'm sure even dNAers have come across such people in your own churches), I had no choice but to step forward more than I normally would have.

A rather charismatic pastor from a local Tamil church conducts our CF held every Thusday and Friday night. His sermons have been quite an extensive series on the subject of faith. The sermons in the church we worship in (yes, that traditional brethren one) are good, but I feel that they are not very new-believer friendly in that they tend to assume the congregation already know much background information (as sermons are always wont to do). Also quite a few of the CF members are Chinese-speaking, so they are often not able to catch and understand everything that the speaker is saying. After service is a special program for us NS trainees, which focuses on more practical aspects of being a Christian such as BGR and peer pressure.

Being from the family I come from, I place much emphasis on studying the Bible, and I felt that none of the 3 spiritual inputs my fellow CF members were getting weekly focused chiefly on the written Word. So I thought I'd talk to my CF pastor to see if he could spare me about half an hour to present a broad overview of the Bible and to introduce each book of the Bible in front of the class. He then told me that he'd tried Bible study before but found previous students bored and uninterested. But he was willing to let me have a try. That was on Thursday night, and as it turned out, he was not available to come and teach us on the very next day (Friday night) and was just wondering what he should do. I took it as a silent nod from God. He said I could gather the people and conduct the little 'talk' then, to which I agreed.

Friday night came, and I started off with a time of sharing. I asked if there was anyone who wanted to share and was taken aback when two offered to share their testimony. It was then that I realized that I had made a gross misconception. All this while it had failed to register that the fact that they were "new Christians" most probably meant they had recently gone through some rather dramatic events in their lives. All this while, what I took to be disinterest and passiveness on their part, was actually mere shyness and a general uncertainty and discomfort as to what was expected of them due to a lack of prolonged exposure to Christian circles - they are just as fired up for Him as I am, probably even more so. Indeed, who was I to expect to them to behave all "church youth"-like, which basically means someone who knows how to lead worship, knows how to say the right prayers at the right time and who speaks up in class, only if to give a nod or say "Amen" or "Hallelujah". After that my little 'talk' went on as expected (their response was rather neutral, which was also much to be expected, but I felt that I had done my job), and then we had more sharing.

Since then, I have been constantly thinking about what I could really do for them. As it happened, I found myself commissioned to distribute Asian Beacon (which is astonishingly heavy in bulk) among the CF. I hope that AB would be beneficial to them and that I would have truly helped them in some way. Still I hope that you all would pray with me for them, that they would truly grow deeper in God and come to know Him and His Word equally well.