Our Struggles over Changing Times

Our Struggles Over Changing Times

Hosanna Evangelical Free Church is Closing

Khen Lim




Image source: johnpavlotivtz.com

Regular readers to our website will notice a few irregular things that have been happening over the past number of weeks. Firstly, the Lux Mundi Sunday Weekly editions have stopped three weeks ago. This previous weekend, there has not been any new articles uploaded and conspicuously absent is the weekly history article as part of the ‘On The Day’ series. For all of this, I apologise.

However there are reasons for all of this. You may notice that the last two major articles posted on October 2 and 9 have to do with the issue of the church closing. Most unfortunately, these articles do echo what is happening to Hosanna EFC (Evangelical Free Church), the church I belong to and the one to which this website has been centring on.

The doors will finally close

As we currently stand, there will be a final referendum this coming weekend on whether or not the church will close. However the writing is already clearly on the wall that it will. Some resistance is there but most of us don’t see how we can go on. The issue is that we don’t have enough funds to keep the doors open for any longer. Hosanna EFC has a congregation the size of most church’s cell groups and most of the people in our church are senior citizens, which makes our funding challenges often difficult to meet. Like other churches, we do have other issues but in the main, it’s essentially a money matter.

If the referendum doesn’t end up changing things, then Hosanna EFC is scheduled to have her last day of service on December 31 2016, which is a Saturday. Along the way, some difficult things will need to be done. One of them happened just today after service when church assets and properties were being accounted for in preparation for them to be sold.

My gravest concern when a church closes are the people who are traumatised by it. Many don’t show it on the outside but some will suffer more than others. Younger people invariably know what to do to find another church to go to. Older people take a little longer because they are likelier to be a little more discriminating in assessing the right church but they will eventually find one they are comfortable with.

Senior citizens are a little different because they mightn’t have the same energy to do what the younger folks can do. They are also inclined to be very comfortable with the church they’ve been going for so many decades (Hosanna EFC is more than 31 years old). They’re set in their ways and they’re very settled also. To now expect them to move on without counselling or guidance is hard to imagine. And they are the ones I am most concerned about. It is these people we need to understand their pain even as we carry our own pains and hurt too.

Surprising numbers

For our regular readers who come to our website because they find our articles of value to them, I’m very torn about what might come next. I’m profoundly grateful that our humble website has reached readers from close to eighty countries around the world. The honest fact is I had never expected something to such a scale and the astonishing thing is the turnout is very regular. Our global coverage is fairly even – Europe (31), Asia (15), Asia-Pacific (4), Latin America (8), Africa (8), Middle East (6) and the Americas (6). While our strongest readership numbers come from America (far more than our home country, Malaysia), we do have periodic big numbers from Russia, Ukraine and many parts of Europe.

When I was attending seminary studies last year, one of my lecturers took a look at copies of my Lux Mundi Sunday Weekly (freely downloadable from our website) and thrashed them in front of our class. She flailed them in the air and rhetorically asked the class whether anyone ever reads such stuff anymore. What she’s trying to say is writing such stuff is a waste of time and this is coming from someone who had studied theology in one form of another at the famous Wheaton College.

I’m glad I can look at all our regular readers who have turned out at our website to prove her completely wrong. I’m glad that you find our articles worth reading more than she gives any of us credit for writing them. I’ll be even gladder to know if any of these articles have helped some of you to find Christ.

Questions to answer

I also know that in the midst of our church closing, some of you will have simple questions to ask concerning this website. So I’m taking this opportunity to provide some answers:

Q. What will happen to this website after the end of this year?

A. Rest be assured that the website will continue.

Q. How can that happen once your church officially closes?

A. Simple. The website actually belongs to me. I work it to represent my church and I resolve to keep it open and to continue writing for it because it helps our readers.

Q. Will the website address change then?

A. That’s a good question. I believe it will change because the part of the URL that says ‘hosannaefc’ can no longer be in the address.

Q. What will the web address change to?

A. I don’t know at the moment. Even if I have one in mind, it might not work because of the possibility that someone else has already used it. So we’ll have to see.

Q. Cab the web address change without affecting the contents?

A. That is a difficult question to answer because I don’t exactly know how the web mechanics work behind the scenes. Although I’m the ‘do-everything-guy’ here, I don’t have enough web maintenance experiences to know exactly how or what to do. All I know, from my simple search on the Internet, is that it is possible to change the URL without having to migrate all the contents, which would have been extremely tedious. So long as I stay within Blogspot, I believe a change of address is possible without affecting any of the contents.

Q. When the web address changes, how will we know what it will be?

A. This is also a difficult one to know. However I think the easiest (but least automated) way to do this is for you to send me an email so that I can have your email address to form a contact list. Once the web address change takes effect, I will send out notification messages using the contact list. These messages are likely to be sent out a few days to a week after the new web address has taken effect. In the meantime, I will also be posting out notices of when this will take place and if I have a new web address in mind, I’ll post that out too.

The notification message will contain the new name of the website plus the new address (URL) as well as the date from which it will be effective.

To write email to me personally, send to castanet.xiosnetworks@gmail.com and address it to Khen Lim. In your email, please furnish me your name and email address. If you have not heard from me by the middle or end of January 2017, please write to me again and copy the same information once more.

Changes to expect

Needless to say, once this website is fully run under my own steam, some of the contents will change. So other than a name and address change, some of the fixed contents will be permanently removed and these will relate to the church.

As for the downloadable Lux Mundi Sunday Weekly (LMSW), I believe these will end as well because these are linked to Hosanna EFC and cannot be used independently. As for whether or not they can take on a different format, I’m not sure. The LMSW has been a very difficult challenge to get up and running every week and readers must understand that I do not get any help whatsoever from anyone to run, manage and maintain this website including the LMSW. Everything here is done manually and purely by me but for the glory of Christ.

My desire to do as much as I can is to bring God’s Word as far and wide across the world as possible. In fact, the amazing thing about this website is that it has reached more people than we could ever do at our own church. So the short answer is, no, not likely the LMSW will continue.

Once this website goes independent, I can welcome any readers to send articles (preferably testimonies with or without pictures) to me to see if they can be published. That is the general idea although I need to work on some policies and conditions because I cannot blindly post anything up without them. 

Further enquiries

For the time being, any of you readers can write to me directly if you have any queries. Again, my email address is castanet.xiosnetworks@gmail.com. I don't know why the feedback feature on my website does not appear to work; otherwise you can write me on the web itself. Sorry about that.

Thanks for reading.

Khen Lim

Editor-writer