Looks Back in Gratitude, Part 4.
Aldersgate Methodist Church
Welcome to Part IV of AMC’s early milestones. Have you read Parts I to III, uploaded between January and March? Make sure to take a look if you haven’t.
These milestones have been curated with our church’s 45th Anniversary in view, which we celebrate this month. This is an occasion to express gratitude to God for 45 years of blessings on our community of believers!
In this spirit, AMC’s Archives and History Committee invites you to embark on a journey through several milestones of AMC’s history. This month, we release our final write-up on significant moments and developments in AMC’s early years.
For longtime members of AMC, these milestones will be brief but valuable reminders of how far we have come, and how thankful we must continue to be.
For those who have recently joined us, we invite you to meditate on these milestones with gratitude, to give thanks to God for the vibrant community we are part of today.
For those still reading, pay close attention to the details shared in these milestones—there may be quizzes during church service from time to time, and prizes, too!
Ready? Let’s Begin!
(5 - 7 mins read)
Doubt and Despair
A Proposal to Dissolve CMC
In mid-1985, a proposal was made at a congregational meeting that, after facing so many obstacles in finding a new home, Clementi Methodist Church be dissolved, and that all its members should return to their home churches.
For some CMC members, though, there was nowhere to go back to! CMC was their home church—they had joined the congregation by profession of faith through baptism in this church.
The proposal to dissolve CMC would eventually be rejected by a vote, through a show of hands. But, how had it come to this? How could we dissolve the church after witnessing the blessings that God had showered upon the congregation in its earliest years?
Why had our church failed repeatedly?
Looking back at the past from our present, from where we have long enjoyed the security of worshipping in our own church building, makes it too easy to be critical of those who despaired all those years ago.
We should try to see the world through the eyes of worshippers in CMC at that time, to understand the questions racing through many of their minds. Why had our church failed repeatedly—thrice in seven years—to acquire a permanent site? Again and again, other churches had outbid us—was CMC not meant to be? And, when we finally had to vacate Portsdown in late 1984, why had the Lord not intervened to provide? Instead, why had the principal of Fairfield Methodist Primary at first permitted us to worship in the school, lifting our hopes, only for the school’s Board of Management to reverse the decision?
Fig. 1: Our congregation worshipping at the Fairfield Primary auditorium (c. 1992). After every Sunday Service, we would pack away things as if to leave no trace of our presence.
Memorandum of Understanding from the Fairfield Schools Board of Management
Even though in December 1984 the Fairfield Schools Board of Management ultimately allowed CMC to use the school auditorium for worship services, the permission came with strings attached. We had to abide by a Memorandum of Understanding that made us solely responsible to account for any and all damage to the property, “no questions asked.”
Our church’s Sunday routine at the Fairfield Primary School would make this liability painfully obvious. Before church service each Sunday, we would lay out red carpets that we had purchased on the wooden floor of the school auditorium, thereby protecting the floor of the school hall from being damaged by the school’s chairs. After the service, we would stack up all the chairs at the back of the hall and roll up the red carpets to store them before leaving.
Could it be that our plans were not His plans?
Walking in the shoes of our predecessors, would we also have begun to doubt? In facing the many obstacles and disappointments of those early years, could it be that our plans were not His plans?
Would we, too, have lost heart in our journey of faith?
Deliverance at Dover
Miracles Do Happen
It is when we are at our lowest, when our strength is spent and we have seemingly laboured in vain, that the Lord reveals His sovereignty in our lives. Where we had failed to deliver CMC to a permanent home, God would bring deliverance in ways we could not have imagined.
In the latter half of 1985, only a few months after the unthinkable proposal to dissolve CMC, came the unexpected, a string of heaven-sent miracles.
Miracle One: The land authority, having made the decision to realign Dover Road near its junction with North Buona Vista Road, in one stroke extended the boundary of Fairfield Methodist Primary School to include a fairly large piece of land. And on 4 September 1985, the government officially offered this land—created out of thin air, so to speak—to the two Fairfield schools, secondary and primary.
First Miracle
So what? Here unfolded Miracle Two: As the Fairfield schools, upon accepting the parcel of new land, had not yet made plans for the use of the space, our church leaders proposed to the Trinity Annual Conference (TRAC) that we build CMC on it, subject to approval from the Ministry of Education (MOE). The answer arrived quickly. On 22 November 1985, MOE accepted that the land could be used to build a church. The Fairfield School Board, having been reluctant over a year ago for us to use the school hall even temporarily, was now willing for us to build our church in the school grounds. This was nothing short of a miracle.
But, even two miracles could not have prepared us for one more, a blessing wrapped up in what seemed a truly disappointing development.
Second Miracle
But, even two miracles could not have prepared us for one more, a blessing wrapped up in what seemed a truly disappointing development.
Indeed, the site earmarked for our future church building turned out to be unsuitable for construction work! Test bores into the grounds revealed that buried directly underneath the site were extensive gas and electricity lines belonging to the Public Utilities Board. Relocating these lines would be prohibitively expensive. It was simply not economically feasible to build the church on that location. Just like that, the promise of a permanent home for our church seemed to slip away again.
Then came Miracle Three: The Fairfield Schools Board of Management agreed to swap the school’s carpark with the new (but unsuitable) space designated for the church building. God had provided once again. With this simple exchange, the building costs associated with managing the construction around the PUB lines shrank significantly. We could at last proceed! Praise God!
Third Miracle
The building project would cost some $4 million, a daunting figure, but God continued to rain his blessings upon His church. Generous financial support from TRAC sister churches, as well as contributions from our own congregation and friends of the church, saw us through. (Fig. 2)
Blessed to Build
Fig. 2. Clementi Methodist Church fundraising pamphlet (undated). The fundraising efforts for the new church building ran between January 1989 and November 1994.
Finally…
Finally, at Christmastime in 1994, after so many years as nomads, our church came to worship at its new home at Dover Road. The church sits squarely in front of both Fairfield Methodist Schools, secondary and primary, an integral part of the family of both schools, and charged with a mission to minister to them (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3: An aerial view of Clementi Methodist Church in Dover Road upon its completion in late 1994.
A Final Detail: Becoming Aldersgate Methodist Church
Our Name
In the late 1990s, as our church prepared to enter its second decade, debate arose over the relevance of our church’s name. Did it still make sense to stick with the name Clementi Methodist Church? In 1979, when our church was constituted, that name was certainly in tune with our early goals. After all, the primary purpose of our pioneer work had been to carry out evangelism among the residents of Clementi New Town. But, for nearly twenty years and four worship locations (none in Clementi), our congregation had never established itself physically in the Clementi area.
There was also no shortage of confusion about our church’s name. Now that it was permanently located on Dover Road, it took a lot of explaining to clarify why we were even situated there, or not named Dover Methodist Church instead.
Then, there was the ‘small’ issue of the words “Aldersgate Chapel” on the side of our church building from the time it became operational in 1994.
Why had we placed these words on the building in the first place? In a nutshell, we had needed to comply with the government’s designation that the site within the school campus be used for a “Chapel/Church.” Accordingly, we had to call the building a “chapel”, and to give it a worthy name we drew inspiration from the very origins of our Methodist tradition, John Wesley’s experience on Aldersgate Street where he felt his “heart strangely warmed” by God.
Aldersgate Chapel?
Aldersgate Methodist Church
It was altogether fitting, then, that at a special congregational meeting on 27 April 1997, our members voted to rename our church Aldersgate Methodist Church, a change made official on 1 July 1997.
Looking back with gratitude at God’s blessings upon our congregation, one’s heart cannot but be “strangely warmed” as well. For, in all the challenges of those early years, wherein our church had tasted some joys from God’s bounty, it would actually be in the moments of bitter disappointment and darkest despair, when it seemed the church might not survive, that the Lord’s redeeming love shone brightest, lighting our way forward.
