Deep in the Word and humbly obeying Christ as king
Director: Pastor Matthew Fong
Maturity begins from being deep in the Word and allowing it to shape our lives. Last year, we focussed on the vision of discipleship in Scripture. We started by looking at Matthew 1-9 as Jesus asks his first disciples to follow him. Then we looked at how mature Christians should view marriage, singleness and sexuality in 1 Corinthians 1-7. We were also able to bring the church together to think about singleness in our seminar with Adam Ch’ng and on parenting with the Gardeners. The second half of the year included our series on work and learning wisdom from Proverbs. The sermon series and life group studies provided a strong foundation to cover major, practical aspects of our lives as we seek to grow and mature as followers of Christ.
Our life groups ministry has continued to grow to include almost 200 people. That’s one of our most significant ministries at CPE! As part of his MTS, Ezekiel Ting has been helping to resource and organise our life groups and did a stellar job considering the size and complexity. He’s also been helping to setup resources to coach life group leaders. Our life groups have also been working on growing a culture of prayer and vulnerability in prayer triplets formed within the groups.
Our young adults ministry, YF, has been growing exponentially year on year. There’s fun and vibrance in that community that’s been drawing many others to join in. It is exciting to thin about the future as these young adults grow, mature and begin serving at CPE.
With over 35 leaders involved in leading our small groups, it requires a significant about of support, training and oversight for leaders to keep it in a healthy state. And our YF ministry also continues to grow faster than we have leaders to minister to them all. As a period of life of significant change, we need to provide the discipleship to help them mature. The other challenge is having the wisdom to know what aspects of church life to focus on when there’s so much we could be doing (e.g. marriage, mental health, mens/womens ministry etc.) without overloading the church calendar with lots of events.
The Life Groups Coaching Team has been expanded significantly for 2025 with Chester Ho, Li-Qing Wong and Jane Tay joining the team. This is new territory for many of the team but hopefully it will set us up to be able to recruit, train and sustain small group leaders as our church grows.
With a mission focus next year, there’s opportunities to work with the mission team to teach on topics and parts of Scripture relating to mission and evangelism. So the maturity team will focus on aiding the mission focus in our teaching series in 2025.
