My father was a businessman and my mother a housewife. They migrated from Guangxhou, China to Sandakan, Sabah. A good number of the Chinese residents in the town centre were Hong Kong migrants, and a Cantonese-speaking community had sprung up. My parents accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour and became members of the Basel […]

My father was a businessman and my mother a housewife. They migrated from Guangxhou, China to Sandakan, Sabah. A good number of the Chinese residents in the town centre were Hong Kong migrants, and a Cantonese-speaking community had sprung up. My parents accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour and became members of the Basel Christian Church of Malaysia (BCCM) a few years after they settled in Sandakan. God blessed my parents with five children, of which I am the third, sandwiched between an older sister and brother, and a young brother and sister.

I was born in Sandakan in 1945 just after the end of the Second World War. Although many people in Sandakan had been tortured and killed during the Japanese occupation, our family was spared from the war; God brought us through the valley of death.

Life for the family was hard after the war. Seeking better work opportunities, we moved to Kudat when I was six. The family purchased a piece of land there and pursued rubber and rice cultivation. I went to primary and junior high school there but returned to Sandakan in 1962 for my senior high school education, as none was available in Kudat at that time.

Unfortunately, soon after I moved to Sandakan, my father was forced to retire from work through illness. My older brother was in Hong Kong pursing his theological studies, so I had to support myself through school.

The loving kindness of a classmate and his elderly widowed mother during this difficult period was a turning point in my life. They showered me with kindness and gracious hospitality and offered me accommodation in their home. This touching experience caused me to ask, “why would God allow such a wonderful deed to happen to me through a non-Christian family rather than a Christian or a relative?” This was an important lesson as God prepared me to enter His Kingdom ministry. It enabled me to be open minded towards people regardless of their background.

My first contact with Sabah’s tribal ethnic minorities can be traced back to my childhood years in Kudat where our neighbours were mainly Rungus people. The Rungus were a forgotten tribe amidst the economic and educational development of the country. They were an under-privileged and exploited group of people, often treated as cheap labour by the Chinese community. Even the Chinese Christian church lacked any sense of social consciousness and racial sensitivity toward the community. I began to understand that God wanted me to learn, experience and appreciate the life, culture, and tradition of people outside my Christian community and to overcome my deeply rooted religious and racial prejudices.

Upon graduation from senior high school, I worked for six months before beginning my theological studies in Hong Kong. As I had been brought up in a very conservative evangelical church background, moving to the open, critical environment of an academic university brought a violent dose of culture shock. Soon I came to understand that God’s abundant mercy and grace are inclusive in nature. I began to grasp what the Apostle Paul discovered in Ephesians 1:4-9. From that point on, the Christian faith has, for me, not only been a matter of spiritual salvation or pursuing personal piety, but rather a change into a new being, encompassing the whole person and others.

My wedding to Brenda took place a few months after my graduation. Marriage, for us, was not just a life commitment to each other but a life dedicated to serving God together as missionaries in Kudat, a journey of faith together to an unknown frontier. Returning to Sabah after my graduation, Brenda and I were sent as missionaries to serve the Protestant Church of Sabah (PCS) in Tinangol. The church was run entirely by missionaries until the late 1960s, when they were asked to leave the country by the government as Islamisation was introduced. Subsequently, BCCM stepped in to help her sister church and a few young pastors were sent to fill the leadership vacuum left by the foreign missionaries.

Even though there was much culture shock and hardship at the beginning, we learned to trust and obey God’s leading and guidance without much complaint. Brenda served the people by dispensing medical and nursing care (having been trained as nurse), while I provided pastoral ministry from village to village.

As a young man quite well trained in the traditional disciple of theology, returning from a modern and well-developed city, I had full confidence that I would be able to manage any questions that might arise in the parish. The reality, however, proved me wrong. When I began to humble myself through a process of self-examination and cultural reflection, I began to appreciate the richness of the indigenous culture, and subsequently overcame my deeply rooted prejudices and misunderstandings.

After three years of mission work, I was convinced I needed to be further equipped for this type of service. We went back to Hong Kong (when my son was just two months old) and I was admitted to a two-year Master of Theology programme. My research, focussed on Christian mission among the Rungus people, and culminated in a thesis entitled, “The Primal Vision: Christian Encounter with Animism.”

We returned to PCS, two years after we left Tinangol, to take up a new assignment as the director of the Theological Education by Extension programme and student chaplain at the church, stationed at the church headquarters near Kudat. Over my four years as TEE director, a wide range of courses were developed to cater for the specific needs of the situation in the area I was working in. The demand was great, and the people were keen and eager to learn, however not much could be done by just one person due to the geographical distance between each of the seven parishes. All I could do was conduct one-week intensive courses in each parish in turn, usually reaching each place about twice per year. Student ministry was also a very demanding task. I spent a great deal of time organising spiritual and character formation lessons for the secondary school students, who came from a mixture of backgrounds, often with very little Bible knowledge.

When the first Christian ecumenical movement in Sabah was born, I was elected as the founding president of the new body. I felt honoured to lead and serve this ecumenical body. It was a platform for priests and pastors of all the participating member churches to share common concerns and confront challenging issues arising from the trend towards religious and racial polarisation infecting the country. In order to foster mutual understanding and better collaboration among the various churches, we put a lot of effort into initiating joint activities and programmes, seminars, worship services and exchange visits. The leaders of the various churches were united amidst growing Islamisation in the 1970s and 1980s. They gathered to pray and support one another in confronting the trials and tribulations of a common threat.

I was also asked to serve as the President of the Federation of Evangelical Lutheran Churches in Singapore and Malaysia, the Coordinator of the Mekong Region Mission of the Lutheran World Federation and President of the Accreditation Commission for the Association for Theological Education in Southeast Asia.

In November 1981 the BCCM General Assembly amended its constitution to make the office of Chief Pastor a fulltime chief executive position. The change was aimed at strengthening the solidarity and resources of the church to encounter the many challenges arising out of racial, religious and political issues affecting the country. Much to my surprise, I was elected as the first full time Chief Pastor. This unexpected development caused an abrupt change in our life and ministry. Our family packed up once more and moved to Kota Kinabalu.

Administration and transformation, mission and development, the ecumenical movement, and theological education were the four foci of my fourteen years of service as the bishop of the church. As the BCCM mission continued to develop and grow, we realised that the churches, particularly those in urban areas, were urgently in need of solid theologically trained leadership. The cost of spiritual leadership is often loneliness. Amid challenges, God taught me to see the complaints and different opinions with a spiritual eye and with humility.

The basic Bible training programmes had become inadequate to meet the growing needs of more educated congregations, and this eventually led to the establishment of the Sabah Theological Seminary (STS). I was officially installed as the first principal of the seminary when STS opened in May 1988. The seminary today still serves as both a spiritual and academic training centre. It provides facilities and opportunities for Malaysians of diverse cultural backgrounds to be trained locally, as pastors and church leaders, up to degree and post-graduate level.

From the seminary’s inception until 1995, I carried the dual responsibilities of bishop of the BCCM and principal of STS. It was a heavy, time-consuming burden, especially during the seminary’s formative years. Handling the many issues was physically exhausting, but all made possibly by the Spirit and the grace of God. As the seminary expanded rapidly, the work of the Principal’s Office became exponentially more demanding. I decided to step down as bishop in 1995 and after 14 years serving as chief pastor and bishop, 8 years of those overlapping with my role as principal of the seminary, I was able to give my full attention to STS for the following 18 years.

Throughout my journey of faith and a lifetime of walking with the Lord, my conviction, commitment, and prayer has never wavered.

Many of our partner churches are working in new territory for the kingdom of God; therefore, spiritual attack is their everyday reality. As a member of a congregation, school, or family, or a couple or individual, you are invited to commit to praying for our partners in mission. For regular prayer point updates, go to www.lca.org.au/international-mission/act-now/pray

Read more stories about our partner churches in Malaysia (Sabah) at https://www.lcamission.org.au/category/stories/international-partners/malaysia-sabah/