The members of City Harvest Church’s Chinese service, helmed by executive pastor Bobby Chaw, make up a vibrant community. From online Bible study sessions together, to meeting in person to fellowship, CHC’s Chinese-speaking members grow spiritually as a family. One cell group leader tells us more.
Since she became a cell group leader in 2010, Eliora Chiam, a zone secretary in CHC’s Chinese service, has been giving personal Bible study lessons to her cell group members. Each time a new member joins her cell group, she would take the member through the first module in the church’s Bible study curriculum, Getting Started, and together they would work their way through the series of Bible study books.
Today, she leads two cell groups, CC63 and CC69, looking after 50 members. As her cell groups have grown larger over the years, Eliora now tasks her cell group coordinators (CGCs) to conduct personal Bible study lessons as well. She explains that this seemingly simple task of holding Bible study lessons helps build relationships— it is this desire to develop closer ties that has sparked off many other activities in her cell groups.
FINDING MANY WAYS TO CONNECT MEANINGFULLY
CHC’s Chinese service began life as a single cell group consisting of the elderly Chinese-speaking parents of church members. It has now grown into a vibrant community, serving the Chinese-speaking elderly population as well as Chinese-speaking individuals from Singapore and other countries.
To be in Chinese service is to be in a cell group. It is where the members learn the Word of God and connect meaningfully with other believers.
The members of CC63 and CC69 make it a point to celebrate each other. Even though their ages range from 38 to 85, they are able to find activities that bind them together. Now that the pandemic is behind them, the members would organise a party once a month with food, games and birthday celebrations. These monthly gatherings also create an opportunity for members to invite unchurched friends to fellowship with them.
To Eliora, relationships are a vital part of life in the cell group. “If we only gather to share the Lord’s Word and to pray, then things become very mechanical,” she explains. “We want to build relationships, we want to touch people’s lives. And to do that, we need to spend time together. I think that’s very important.”
The Chinese service cell groups quite literally do life together. Outside of cell group meetings, members also gather in small connect groups to conduct fun activities like durian-eating, baking and painting.
“I had a member who felt more connected to the cell group through our art activities,” Eliora recounts. “When she first joined us, she could not really connect with others because cell group meetings only focused on the Word of God. But through these art sessions, her heart became much more open and she started connecting with others.”
It is no surprise that Eliora is also in charge of the Greeters Ministry in Chinese service. This means that she gets to meet all the newcomers and introduce them to the church. She also assigns them to different cell groups.
“I have many greeters in my cell group, so we are open to newcomers,” she says. When a newcomer joins her cell group, the cell group members engage them and visit them at home. Once the newcomer starts to attend services more regularly, he or she is invited to join the cell group every week.
Ministering to newcomers to the Chinese service requires a different approach. “The elderly usually takes a longer time to warm up to us,” Eliora explains. “If they are parents of our English service members, I would ask the children to accompany their parents to the Chinese service for two months or more. They really need their children to sit with them in service until they are familiar with us. Once these parents have made some friends in the service, their children can return to their own services.”
STAYING CONNECTED DURING COVID-19
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, cell group meetings were disrupted but the cell group leader made sure that her members stayed connected to each other and to the Lord.
During the lockdown, the first thing that Eliora did was to get her CGCs to record short devotional videos to share on their WhatsApp group chat for the cell group, as well as on the group’s private Facebook page. This means that the members received a dose of encouragement every day.
“They could share whatever they wanted,” she elaborated. “Some would put up a link to a song, some played a piece of music and others shared a devotional message.”
Eliora’s cell groups fall under the care of Chinese service pastoral supervisor Lu Guorong. During the lockdown, a member in the zone started an online programme to read the Bible with the elderly members in the zone daily. Subsequently, Guorong took over the programme and has been reading the Bible every Monday, Wednesday and Friday ever since. Today, members from other pastoral zones join the reading programme too.
“Guorong would prepare slides with the Bible verses, along with commentaries, and he would read to them for about two hours,” Eliora shares. “My elderly members love it! They tell me they understand the Bible so much more now, especially the books of the prophets in the Old Testament which are seldom taught in church.”
Leaders lead by example, as they say. During the lockdown in 2020, Pastor Bobby began giving online Bible study lessons—starting with the module Victorious Living—consistently in a bid to keep his members connected to God and His Word.
In March 2021, he began teaching Songs Of Solomon, expounding on every verse in the eight chapters. Once a fortnight, on a Wednesday evening, between 170 to 200 members would gather online to study this book with Pastor Bobby. The study of this book will finally end this July.
HELPING THE ELDERLY
A special group of members in Eliora’s cell groups is the “Golden Flower Team”. “They are a group of very nice grandmas,” she says. “We would fellowship, learn cooking skills from each other and we also study God’s word together.”
When the lockdown started, Eliora was concerned about keeping this group of members connected. She quickly taught them to use Zoom, so that they could meet with her virtually.
“If you want to teach something to the elderly, you need to be very patient and be ready to repeat your instructions over and over again until they get it,” she notes. Her patience paid off and eventually, the elderly members mastered Zoom and Eliora happily announced to her groups that they were starting cell group meetings online.
The “Golden Flower Team” birthday celebration.
“I’m very proud of my Golden Flower Team, they really set a good example for the rest,” she smiles. “Of course, when we talk about Zoom now, everyone knows how to use it. But back then, Zoom was very new to everyone, and it was honestly a challenge even for the adults in my cell group to learn because not all of them are tech-savvy or even computer literature. But when they saw that even the elderly members—most of the Golden Flower Team only attended primary school—managed to learn, they were motivated too.”
Soon, the cell groups were gathering online often for various activities. Besides cell group meetings, they also exercised together and played games online. On special occasions like Father’s Day, Mother’s Day or the Mid-Autumn festival, they would also plan special celebrations and deliver gifts to each other.
Zoom was not the only technology the elderly members mastered; they also learned to use AXS machines to make necessary payments. “I had to show them many times. I also snapped pictures of each page on the machine and put them into a PowerPoint presentation,” she laughs at the memory.
During the pandemic, the members would delivering birthday presents to each other was a norm.It is the faithfulness of her members that propels her to do more for them. She shares the testimony of an elderly member who would meet up with another member every month. This member hit her foot just as she was about to leave home one day. It hurt, but she didn’t want her friend to wait, so she made her way to meet her friend. When she got home, she told her daughter that her foot hurt. They went to the hospital and discovered that she had fractured her toe.
“This member is 75 and has osteoporosis. We prayed for her and told her to stay home to rest,” Eliora recounts. But the member was not one to listen. After a few days, she said there was no more pain and that she could go to church that weekend. To convince her worried family and cell group members, the 75-year-old went back to her doctor and was told there was no fracture to be found. “God is really so good to her,” declares her cell group leader.
A cell group is a place where members support each other through both happy and difficult moments. Eliora is thankful that even during the pandemic when there were so many uncertainties and restrictions, her members were still faithful in gathering as one: “We’re thankful to God that in Him, we could still enjoy ourselves and one another during those times.”
