Every year CityLife Church sends teams of our members to visit our missions partners all around the world. These teams work together with our local partners to be a blessing to the local communities. For more information about our missions trips, visit this page.
In December 2016, a team made up of members from our Manningham and Knox congregations, led by Youth Pastor U-Wen, left on a missions trip to Cambodia. Here’s the first of their updates from the field.
We’ve been in Cambodia for two days now, and everyone has settled in very well. I am thoroughly impressed with the calibre of young men and women on this trip – everyone has conducted themselves with excellence, and they are already beginning to step outside their comfort zones, encountering God and discovering more about themselves along the way.
On Saturday, after arriving, we checked in and got settled; after lunch and a brief period of rest, we went to New Life Fellowship’s (NLF) Toul Sangke campus in order to attend and participate in their youth meeting. Many of the NLF staff and volunteers were attending a wedding that night, so we were able to help them by stepping in and filling many roles.
After the service (where we ran a few games, shared a testimony and spent lots of time getting to know the local youth), we spent a few hours helping decorate the church building for Christmas. Although this was very tiring, and only finished around 10pm, our work was not spent in vain, as every member of the church commented on how great the church looked! We have been asked to replicate this design at their main campus.
On Sunday, we separated into two teams. One team went to a rural province, where they helped run a kids program with around 95 kids attending. They conducted themselves extremely well with everyone participating and working well together. The other team attended NLF’s main campus in the city centre, running two children’s programs: one for 5-6 year-olds, and another for the primary school kids.
After this, we returned to the Toul Sangke campus in order to attend their Sunday afternoon service. Here, under the eye of the guest speaker, a pastor from C3 Oxford Falls, the team helped to pray for some people and were also ministered to.
Tomorrow, we will be doing some historical and cultural tourism, visiting Toul Sleng, a converted primary school that served as one of the Khmer Rouge’s torture camps, and the Killing Fields, an execution site for enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime. This will be an emotionally intense day, but one of immense importance, as it will help our team to contextualise their observations of Cambodia through its history. If you don’t know much about Cambodia and its history, allow me to suggest you look it up – the country has a rich and proud heritage, marred by the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.
I’d like to thank each of you for your continued support – as parents, friends, and family of the team members, your prayers are vital in helping us. What many people don’t realise is that very-short-term missions trips like this one are less about the impact that the team can have on the country, and much more about the participants discovering what God is doing in another country, and discovering more and more about themselves. It’s clear that this process has already begun, and I’m excited to see where God takes these fine young people. I am immensely proud of each and every single one of them, and they have already begun exceeding my expectations of them.
Until our next update, I wish you all the best.
Blessings,
U-Wen