When Pastor Guna Raman first decided to mobilise his congregation to serve the neighbourhood 23 years ago, including gifting households with fruit cakes at Christmas, he never dreamed that out of the community friendships would come the next leader of his church. 

But last November, after almost 30 years as senior pastor at Agape Baptist Church, Ps Guna handed over the reins to Ps Wong Guoliang, a resident of the very community the church has been serving for more than two decades.

“Sow a fruit cake, reap a senior pastor!” Ps Guna quipped with a laugh. 

No strings attached

Agape’s work in the community started off “without a plan” back in 1997, said Ps Guna, who is also the church’s founding pastor.

After seven years of moving from one temporary location to another, Agape finally found a home at 1 Dorset Road, where it still stands today. 

Happy to have finally found somewhere to settle down in, Ps Guna and his church decided to say a little hello to their new neighbours – residents in the Pek Kio community – by going door to door to give out fruit and nut loaves during the Christmas season.

Unexpectedly, it created quite a buzz in the community.

“People were talking about us, saying that this was something they had never seen or experienced before. Some people were suspicious of us about why we were doing this while others were welcoming of it,” recalled Ps Guna. 

This gift to the residents was meant to be a “one-off thing”, but he began to see the potential of engaging the community on a regular basis. 

The following year, church members fanned out to do a community survey, visiting each house to ask residents if they had any needs.

“They talked to us as if we were the PAP (People’s Action Party), telling us there weren’t enough buses or they weren’t frequent enough, those kind of things,” Ps Guna said with a chuckle.

But the survey also surfaced needs that the church found they could meet. Slowly, they began holding tuition programmes for the children, cooking classes and other fun activities like aerobic workouts and Mother’s Day events that brought some life to an otherwise sleepy neighbourhood.

The church also discovered there was a particular block, comprising mostly rented one-room units, where the poor and elderly lived. They paid “very special attention” to that block, visiting every now and then to help residents do clean-ups, painting and maintenance work, said Ps Guna.

At their own initiative, church members would also arrange free haircuts for the elderly residents, take them out for excursions and even accompany them for hospital visits.

Ps Guna said these acts of love and service were done with “no strings attached”.

“We wanted to do this for them not because we wanted to get something out of them, like getting them to come to church.

“Our responsibility is just to display the love of God to them, and it’s God’s responsibility to bring them to Himself. If they do come to church, it’s because they want to. We had to learn to leave that into the hands of the Lord.”

Answered prayers

For the next two decades, Agape faithfully cared for the 21 blocks in the Pek Kio community.

During festive seasons, they would come bearing gifts, such as mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival and fruit and nut loaves during Christmas.

One of the residents who received these gifts was Shirley Ong, who had moved into the estate with her family as a little girl and grew up knowing that people from a nearby church would turn up with gifts every year without fail.

Though she was not a believer then, she was touched by their sincerity, especially during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) period when members went around giving out free hand sanitisers.

During this COVID-19 season, members from Agape Baptist Church have also gone door to door giving out hand wash to residents in the Pek Kio community.

“I was really impressed. Everyone was trying to stay at home and not have contact with others, but this church was really different, so radical,” Shirley, now 39, said, adding that these kind gestures by the body of Christ “definitely” played a part in her decision to accept Jesus later on in her life.

It was an answered prayer for Ps Guna, who in the earlier years would do frequent prayer walks in the community. Twice a week in the quiet of the morning, he would walk around the Pek Kio estate, praying that God would open up hearts and allow Agape’s faithful efforts to bear fruit for His glory.

God was doing just that, but also much more than he had asked.

A church with heart

In 2008, Shirley’s then boyfriend was none other than Ps Guoliang, a general paper teacher at a local junior college who was beginning to sense a deep restlessness in his heart.

Day after day as he spoke to his students about the realities of politics, terrorism and globalisation, he yearned to tell them about the most important truth.

“It was frustrating not to be able to fully express that you need a personal relationship with God, that the Gospel is real, that there’s only one Name by which you can be saved,” he said.

“I felt a disconnect between what I really wanted to say and what I was spending my time saying most of the time. I told God: I want to spend my time dedicating myself to saying what really matters.”

And so began a long journey of praying and seeking God about this new calling. During this time, he got married and moved into the Pek Kio community with Shirley.

In 2011, the couple – who by then had an infant son – felt a call to leave their home church and began visiting churches in search of one to settle down in.

Shirley suggested visiting Agape. “Besides being close to our house, it’s a church with heart,” she told her husband, recalling all the years that the church had faithfully cared for the residents.

So they visited, and both were touched by how caring the community was. “We found it was a Gospel-centred church who cares,” said Ps Guoliang, who settled down in the church with his family that June.

In February 2014, he answered God’s call into full-time ministry, working first as a pastoral staff intern and subsequently, in 2016, as a pastor in Agape.

Orchestrated by God

During this time, Ps Guna had been thinking about stepping down to allow someone younger to fill the leadership role. City to City Asia Pacific, an international church planting organisation, had also approached him to be its chief executive officer.

He saw potential in Ps Guoliang, groomed him and handed over the reins to him late last year during the church’s 35th anniversary celebrations.

Ps Guna and other church leaders praying for Ps Guoliang and his family during his installation as senior pastor, which was held during Agape Baptist Church’s 35th anniversary celebrations.

“Never would I have thought or imagined that someone from the community would become our next senior pastor,” Ps Guna said, adding that he is amazed how God orchestrated everything one step at a time without them even realising it.

“This whole narrative is truly by God. From the very beginning, stepping into the community was very much unplanned. If you told me that it would last for 20 years, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it. Take so long, so much commitment!

“We never knew that doing so would bless the church back in such a powerful way, with the next leader of the church coming out of that.”

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