Connecting in love through Christ-centred community

Director: Pastor Iggy Wong (2024)/Ezekiel Ting (2025)

Highlights

• One of our strengths is our community. It has been an enormous encouragement seeing new people walk through our doors each week, giving us consistent feedback that they’ve felt very warmly welcomed. One of the reasons CPE continues to grow in numbers, is that new guests feel at home and this is a great testimony to the love that our community shows.
• Our host teams has been vital in helping our culture of welcoming and we’ve been thankful for the leadership of Jun Thean as she’s started her role as Area Leader here in mid 2024. (We are thankful to Dennis Mehling for his service previously here)
• Onboard continues to be a strong platform for people to integrate deeper into the life of the church with 68 people going through in 2024.
• On a more informal front, the care being shown by members towards each other in times of need continues to be encouraging, with Life Groups in particularly coming together well to support those who are grieving or struggling in other ways.

Challenges

• Finding the best way ways to follow up an increasing number of newcomers continues to present challenges, with some new initiatives at the host desk being hampered by technical difficulties.
• Finding ways to care for people that might not fit neatly into our current structures (eg. life groups) is a challenge that becomes more present as we grow.
• Growing gaps of connection between different demographic groups as church numbers grow.

Key Initiatives

• Integration of returning visitors is a key focus area. Host Team continues to be vital in our welcoming and integration work, and we are experimenting with ways to connect with returning visitors through intentional conversations which include presenting clear next steps and introduction to other members of CPE.
• Reviewing existing connect and care structures with particular focus on gaps such as caring for those who don’t fit into current structures and defining clear scopes of care for ministry teams and leaders.
• Creating more opportunities for connection between different demographic groups such as through sharing of more stories through the life of church and building more mixed events, ministry teams and life groups.

Please give thanks and pray for these things we have shared

It’s encouraging leading host team as I get to see the hearts my team members have for God and to love others that walk through our church doors. Taking initiative, raising good ideas, looking after each other sacrificially are encouraging traits I see in the people that serve in host team.

Jun Thean, Host Team Area Leader