Departure Points: My Life and Ministry among the Indigenous Peoples of Borneo & Singapore’s Sojourn

This book is a narration of my life and ministry among the indigenous peoples of Borneo in Sabah from 1994-2019. The events told are based on my personal recollections and I have not referred to any notes, books or minutes of meetings except in a few places which I acknowledged in the footnotes. To the best of my knowledge the modern history of SIB Sabah has yet to be written (1990 onwards). My book is not a historical narrative nor historiography but a recollection of events from 1989 onwards. I leave it to the historians and research students to write SIB’s modern history or evaluate what I have written here. Writing memoirs is a meditative and selective process. We choose what we want to remember and this is my interpretation of events, most of which I had participated in or possessed first-hand knowledge. I have started writing without an outline and without knowing what I was going to write, so what I wrote over two months (Oct 2014) with little revision afterwards, consists of what I remember to be important and significant in this first half of my life and ministry. According to the book of Numbers, the priests begin their duties when they are 30 years old and retire from service when they turn 50. I was 30 years, four months and 5 days old when I started and I have reached 50 in 2014. These memoirs are my reflections of 25 years in active service of the ministry and service of the burden in the house of the congregation of the Lord (Numbers 4:47). I trust that the map shown in the book will give you a sense of the location where I had travelled into 100 villages and towns, almost all of which I had preached and ministered in. My prayer is that for all those who have heard me preached in Sabah, West Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, New Zealand and Hong Kong and believers around the world will find something helpful and spiritually edifying in this book. May the name of Jesus Christ our Lord be glorified now and forever.

14th October 2019, Feast of Tabernacles, 15th Tishri (5780)