Big Churches Getting Larger

Friday, Oct. 16, 2009 Posted: 3:18:04PM HKT

New Creation Church members and attendants queueing outside the Rock auditorium in the Suntec City shopping mall before one of the church's regular services held there. (Photo: NCC)

An Evangelical Pentecostal congregation is on the growth track, according to its senior pastor.

The 4,000-strong Hope Church (Singapore) is outgrowing its premises. And that is the reason the church's leader Pastor Jeffrey Chong has been speaking to his congregants about preparing a larger location or 'base camp' to hold its services, a video message on the website of Hope Church (Singapore) showed.

Four out of the seven services currently held at the church’s location at the Nexus Auditorium in Cuppage Plaza are more than 80 percent filled, Chong reported in his February message.

The church conducts a total of twelve weekly services for adults, children, the Mandarin speaking, and Filipinos, seven of which are held at its main premises in Nexus.

Pastor Chong says the new venue will also be used for conferences and to serve the community.

Hope Church (Singapore), among the larger congregations in Singapore, is not the only one of its kind. Statistics show membership increasing in the biggest Protestant churches here.

City Harvest Church, the largest congregation, has reported a 13 percent increase from 22,833 members in 2008 to 25,880 members in 2009.

The church has a weekly attendance of 27,086 people, its founder Kong Hee announced at the 20th anniversary celebrations of the congregation held in early August this year.

Another independent church, New Creation Church, has grown from over 10,000 members in 2004 to 19,000 members today, according to the NCC website. NCC is the second largest congregation on the island.

The Pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination grew from 24,347 to 30,779 weekly attendants but dropped from 15,479 to 14,861 registered members comparing the 2005-2006 (correct as of 31 March 2005) and 2009-2010 (correct as of 15 March 2009) issues of the directory of churches and Christian organisations published by the National Council of Churches of Singapore.

Aside from non-denominational churches, the biggest mainstream Protestant denomination, The Methodist Church in Singapore, has grown from 32,236 members to over 35,000 members comparing the 2005-2006 and 2009-2010 issues of the directory.

The only other mainline denomination to report growth is the Singapore Baptist Convention, which grew from 8,500 members to 10,000 members compring the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 issues of the directory.

Christians constitute 14.6 percent of the total Singapore population, the 2000 Census reported. But some church and Christian leaders here have stressed that the statistical measures used do not give a fully accurate figure. Unofficial sources put the actual figure closer to 20 percent or one in five.

There are around 500 individual congregations in Singapore, with most of them being smaller churches, experts say. These churches range from ten or twenty people to a few hundred members. A church with at least 2,000 members is classified as a mega-church.

Edmond Chua
edmond@christianpost.com