To Invest or To Tighten

Life's so much fun with all the decision making ability given to us by God. For Christians, it's known as the "free will" though some would argue otherwise.

From people to organisations, countries to churches, we all have learn to make the best & right decisions. This of course includes financial decisions, which is quite an exciting challenge!

As a Malaysian Chinese, we're often taught to be thrifty, to save as much as you can and only start to spend it when you have a comfort "buffer". In another words, it's to tigthen up to survive.

After spending a decade in Melbourne, I come to regconize the pattern of Caucasians governance in some sense. It's very obvious during the GFC, most of the governments adopted the strategy of investing for growth.

Stimulus packages, grants, tax reliefs, etc. All are aimed towards futures prosperity and not just the short term.

So, it's a little culture shock when we started to see the governments spending like crazy in times of crisis! Billions are poured in multiple industries just to keep it going while from our background, we would have been cutting expenses as much as we can.

Having said that, they also did some costs cutting measures to keep the ball rolling. Even with billions spent, without proper restructuring, it wouldn't last as well. Billions would end up like cents!

So, as a church, what can we learn from this GFC?

We need to continue to invest into the future by laying out plans and goals for the short, medium and long terms. Then we can work out budget around it to achieve those plans. By injecting the proper resources (human, funds, etc) into the right ministry will help the church to continue to grow.

At the same time, we need to evaluate on our current ministries. Which ministries that we can afford to temporary lay off or shut down. There's a saying, "All things are good, but not all things are right".

By properly channelling our resources, we can ensure greater works being done in the church ministries. These are the core ministries that our church can never neglect. These are:

1) Mission & Evangelism

2) Christian Education

3) Small Groups

4) Prayer

If we're not investing more resources in those core ministries, I'd like to know what else could be more important? Day-to-day church admins? Spending on technologies & equipments?

I know some might say, "let's get our books balance first then we can plan" or the ever famous "we will wait for God Himself to lead".

Let us remind ourselves that, God has initiated His works. Are we spiritually sensitive enough to feel it or how are we going to respond? keep on waiting?

I have a funny feeling that our belts are too tight now. Perhaps we should increase our belt size and start to invest on what's right? Let's not choke ourselves to death!

Comparisons With Improvements :)

Thanks to Nearmap, now I can have a look at my land from the comfort of my living room! Saving me about 80Km return trips each time just to have a look soils..and some rocks!

On 12/10/09

Latest on 13/11/09

The rocks have gotten less now...phew..good news! Hopefully everything will be cleared out soon! Waiting to see when the roads will be built!

Outsourcing

The world is moving in such a pace that if we decided to take a break, we'll be left behind. Gone are the days where we can play rabbit and take a nap while waiting for the slow tortoise to catch up.

However, being the leader of the pack, we need to examine our strengths and positions to ensure that we do not strecth ourselves too much. In IT terminology, we shouldn't be paying too much for tomorrow's technologies.

Today, outsourcing is a very good way of not strecthing ourselves to the limit and yet being able to be on top of our game!

Outsourcing - The procuring of services or products from an outside supplier or manufacturer in order to cut costs.

A good example of this is from SHA, where we outsourced our internet service to an outside provider.

The Internet service for the SHA buildings are good, but only if it was about 5 years ago! It isn't competitive enough to survive in the Internet market. Hence, our value added service to the students have declined by the years in this aspect. In fact, I felt ashamed to answer if prospective tenants and tenants asked me about the Internet packages that we offered.

However, recently we just found out that we have given the tender to a different company to provide the Internet service to all our buildings.. From a rough briefing today, it's certainly a huge leap forward in providing better services to the tenants.

By outsourcing this service, SHA managed to save costs up to roughly $700,000 of hardware investments upgrading each of our buildings. Not to mention the running costs, overheads, etc.

The new services provided will certainly enable SHA to again claim the statement of providing "discount high speed broadband Internet".

Without outsourcing, all these wouldn't have been possible as I just couldn't imagine our company investing more than half a million upgrading the IT equipments in all of our buildings! We would probably still be stuck with dial up internet if it wasn't for outsourcing.

It's definitely a good news for the occupants of MiCasa8 as we'll enjoy maximum benefits of the new Internet services soon! The plans are yet to be released but I guess it will be a whole lot better than what it is now.

They do not have to go through Telstra for the ridiculuously expensive phone line connection ($>300.00) anymore~! Yay~!

King Asa = Us?

Yesterday, while we were studying "Experiencing God", we were asked about King Asa's situations whether he was God centered or Self centered in 2 scenarios. Well, the answers are pretty obvious and you don't have to be a genius to figure it out.

Then suddenly a funny thought went through my mind. Before I get into that, let's have a quick history flashback on King Asa.

Basically, the first 35 years of his reign was all nice and good because he was reliant on the Lord.

2 Chron 14:11 Then Asa called to the LORD his God and said, "LORD, there is no one like you to help the powerless against the mighty. Help us, O LORD our God, for we rely on you, and in your name we have come against this vast army. O LORD, you are our God; do not let man prevail against you."


2 Chron 15:19 There was no more war until the thirty-fifth year of Asa's reign.

After that, he started on rely on himself and his allies rather than the Lord.

2 Chron 16:2-3 Asa then took the silver and gold out of the treasuries of the LORD's temple and of his own palace and sent it to Ben-Hadad king of Aram, who was ruling in Damascus.  "Let there be a treaty between me and you," he said, "as there was between my father and your father. See, I am sending you silver and gold. Now break your treaty with Baasha king of Israel so he will withdraw from me."

2 Chron 16:7-9 At that time Hanani the seer came to Asa king of Judah and said to him: "Because you relied on the king of Aram and not on the LORD your God, the army of the king of Aram has escaped from your hand. Were not the Cushites and Libyans a mighty army with great numbers of chariots and horsemen ? Yet when you relied on the LORD, he delivered them into your hand. For the eyes of the LORD range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. You have done a foolish thing, and from now on you will be at war."

So my comparison is this:

We have always relied on the Lord from the day our church started back in 2000/01. Prayers have always been the driving force for us from doubling our members each year and to accomplish a near to impossible tasks (in everyone's else's mind) by forming a local church in 2007.

God was heavily sought after during those times but in the last few years, we seems to have forgotten our root and started relying more on ourselves. Prayer meeting numbers dropped significantly, ill-advised decisions were made, etc.

Even up to today (though I may not know the full picture yet), we have not been awaken yet. We all (especially LCEC members) knew that we're being told that we're going to be in charge of the 2013 Annual Conference. It's quite a big thing, it's almost like when King Asa was threatened by Baasha, King of Isreal.

While King Asa decided to seek help and support from Ben-Hadad, King of Aram; We seek help from Camberwell Church.

Instead of praying to God for directions and help, we are seeking financial help from our allies, Camberwell Church because everyone in CLMC (or 99%) believed that we can't do it by ourselves. As far as my limited knowledge knows, we're not doing anything else except waiting for an answer from Camberwell on whether to help us or not and the decision should by known by this year's AC around end of November.

Now, the question is, is this act God-centered or self-centered?

If this is a God-centered act, how so?

If this is a self-centered act, shouldn't we repent now and started praying hard and seek God's will? This could be the turning point for CLMC to come back to God in unity?

Or are we going to end up like King Asa?

2 Chron 16:12 In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was afflicted with a disease in his feet. Though his disease was severe, even in his illness he did not seek help from the LORD, but only from the physicians.

Anyway, those are just my observations and feel free to correct me if anything I said is wrong....:)

Mr Keris-Man - Employee of the year?

KPI, KPI, KPI...it has become such a normal term in Malaysia these days after the introduction of KPIs to Goverment departments.

Who is the hardest working man in Govt now? Well, most people might say Najib as he's not the sleeping PM but just saw this in the paper today.

PUTRAJAYA: The Home Minis­try has completed the mammoth task of clearing the backlog of over 140,000 applications for citizenship, entry permits and birth certificates — two months ahead of schedule.

It has processed 143,099 files — 32,927 citizenship, 16,812 entry permit (permanent residence) and 93,360 birth certificate applications — filed between 1997 and December 2006. More on The Star

 It seems the employee of the year award might just go to Mr Keris! He He!!

Nonetheless, hats off for this guy for clearing the backlog created over the years.

We also hope to see more improvements in his Ministry as well as speeding up or relax the requirement a bit for the process of foreign spouse PR applications, etc.

We're not expecting a jump in performance, but at least move faster than what BN has been moving for 50+ years!