Reported by Kenneth Chang and Desmond Choe • May 15, 2021
Since early 2020, as part of our cell group’s IMPACTNow initiative, we felt that God was telling us to be a blessing to our brothers and sisters in Christ from East Malaysia. With that, we connected with a local Iban church – the Christ Baptist Church led by Senior Pastor Greman Ujang in Kuching, Sarawak.
Pastor Greman is a good friend of the father of one of our cell members, who has been supporting him and his ministry for many years. We connected with both Pastor Greman and his daughter, Tabitha Ujang and asked how we could help. Tabitha shared with us her passion for the young adults and invited us to visit their church to be an encouragement to the young adults in her church. Unfortunately, due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent movement control orders, our Sarawak trip had to be put on hold.
In our discussions and sharing, Tabitha also shared with us the needs of the church and requested for Christian literature, training materials, and books for the church. She also shared that donation of clothes would be helpful to the poor in Sarawak. The cell prayed and decided that we were going to meet this need, and as such we proceeded to conduct a charity drive to collect used books, Christian materials, and clothes. We managed to collect about 5 big boxes of donations which were subsequently shipped to Kuching, Sarawak in mid-2020.
There was also a request for Iban Bibles and we likewise took up the challenge to raise funds to purchase 100 Bup Kudus (Iban bibles) for the church. Typically, our Cell Group’s annual charity activity is to have a charity bake-off where everyone in the cell will make time to meet and bake together goods to be sold for charity. This has been a tradition of the cell for the last three years. It is also a tradition of the cell group to absorb the cost of ingredients so that the full proceeds from sales can be given away. By leveraging off this system we had in place, we had a charity bakeoff in conjunction with Chinese New Year to raise funds for this need. Through our sales and generous donations from various individuals, we raised approximately RM4,000.00 which was more than what we needed for these Iban bibles! Praise the Lord! We bought all the Iban bibles Christ Baptist Church required and used the remainder to pay for the shipping cost.
Over the Christmas period, we organised another charity bake-off and managed to raise another RM4,000.00. This time, we sent the whole amount collected to Christ Baptist Church and to be used by the Youth Ministry there. Despite the various movement control orders and interstate travel ban, we remained connected to both Pastor Greman and Tabitha. They have even joined our cell meetings as guest speakers on two occasions and we have been tremendously blessed by their sharing.
We are truly grateful to God for enabling us to be a blessing to others even when we are physically apart. Thank you, God, for using us to bless others and we pray that God will continue to speak and lead us in this partnership with Pastor Greman, Tabitha and Christ Baptist Church.
A Cell Group’s Blessing to Christ Baptist Church in Kuching, Sarawak
Reported by Kenneth Chang and Desmond Choe (PJN1)