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HARVESTFORCE 2021 • 1
WE are NOT ALONE This article was jointly written by:
Col (Ret) Quek Koh Eng Church Engagement Director
Grace Chung Church Engagement Manager
M
MS was officially established on 30 September 1991 to become a missions agency of the Methodist Church of Singapore. Its primarily mission is to establish indigenous churches where none currently exists and aims to be a disciple-making movement that touches and transforms lives. Church Planting and Community Development are the integrated strategies that aim to transform lives and communities1. This mission comes alive as a testament as shown in the past 29 years of mission partnerships with the Annual Conferences, Methodist churches, and donors in Singapore, together with missionaries and hundreds of national pastors and colabourers serving in Cambodia, East Asia, Laos, Nepal, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. Col (Ret) Quek Koh Eng, Field/Church Engagement Director, emphasised “MMS does not and cannot work alone” as of vital importance to develop the Church Engagement Strategy2. We are encouraged that God has seen MMS through the years by bringing together faithful men and women to fervently contribute and carry out God’s mission work. We are also blessed by the Methodist churches and communities that have come alongside MMS to pray, to love, and to contribute generously their time, efforts, and resources toward our ministries and missionaries. Moving forward, as a denominational missions agency, MMS endeavours to be an agency of choice amongst the Methodist community in Singapore. While we have come some way in establishing our work in seven countries over the past 29 years, we are nevertheless mindful of our inadequacies as we journey on. However, by the grace of God, we believe we are now at a point where we need to expand our partnership, enrich our collective call, and energise our congregations in the area of missions. The MMS Church Engagement Team (CET) desires to build capacity by enhancing stakeholder and partnership relations strategically, managing expectations, and engaging churches in a meaningful way to deepen the partnership with all three Annual Conferences—Chinese Annual Conference (CAC), Emmanuel Tamil Annual Conference (ETAC), and Trinity Annual Conference (TRAC)—, all local Methodist churches, and missions committees. This can be achieved through a 3-phase framework of conducting a missions pulse survey, dialogues, and forums with the following key outcomes: • Deepen the relationship and partnership with the Annual Conferences and all local Methodist churches in Singapore.
Book of Discipline, para 371. 2 Col (Ret) Quek Koh Eng, Field/Church Engagement and Area Director’s Report, MMS Strategy for Church Engagement. 3 Rev Derrick Lau, Strategic Directions 2025, dated 2019. 1
• Receive valuable and meaningful feedback to customise and realign action plans for the collaboration in mission and ministries initiatives. • Have a greater clarity of what is expected of MMS as a denominational missions agency, and a more coherent understanding between the roles of local Methodist churches and the missions agency, and its relationship to them. • Enhance partner relationship, improve partnership retention, and form new partnerships. Rev Derrick Lau, MMS Executive Director, sets out one of the Strategic Direction 2025 goals as having Church Engagement as an essential initiative of MMS to engage, excite, encourage, equip, and establish mission interest, involvement, and partnership in all our Methodist churches from CAC, ETAC, and TRAC3.
