  City Harvest founder senior pastor Kong Hee
By Kalinga Seneviratne*
IDN-InDepth NewsFeature
SINGAPORE (IDN) - Every Sunday morning thousands of young and old pour into Singapore's two convention centres -- Expo and Suntec -- packing into large halls with blinding stage-lights, camera crews on cranes transmitting pictures onto jumbo electronic screens with multimedia effects.
This is where showbiz meets spirituality, and like its pop star counterparts, the pastors who perform on stage clad in leather jackets and knee-high boots, draws in not only huge adoring fans but millions of dollars into their coffers. The fans (devotees) are able to contribute their dues to God via credit cards, Giros (monthly deductions from their bank account) or eNets on line(direct debits from your account).
Though Christians make up only 15 percent of the tiny but affluent Southeast Asian city-state's 4 million population, they are a very influential minority well represented in business, professions -- like medicine, law and accounting -- media and in politics.
The evangelical Protestant churches have grown alarmingly in the past decade with a few mega-churches massing multi-million dollar assets and business interests. But, it is their aggressive proselytising and disrespect for other faiths that have recently attracted much attention, and lately government investigations about their business activities and preaching styles.
Leading the stable of mega-churches is City Harvest Church with an estimated membership of 33,000 and 2009 audited accounts showing Singapore dollar 103 million (US$ 71 million) in reserves. They have a full time staff of 154 with a wage bill of Singapore dollars 9.3 million a year. They have a church complex in the westerns parts of the island worth S$ 47.6 million, which is fully paid up and in March this year the church reportedly made a S$ 310 million deal to buy the major shares in the Suntec convention centre.
It is this business deal which made many Singaporeans unhappy about a religious organization with tax-free status in the country acting like a corporation rather than a spiritual centre. This prompted the government to mount an investigation about its business deals triggering a wide ranging debate in the media and on the Internet regarding the commercial and showbiz face of evangelical Christianity in Singapore.
Media spotlight on City Harvest and a number of other churches has brought to light many interesting aspects of modern day evangelical Christianity. One of which is that many of mega-church pastors hold business degrees rather than divinity degrees, and they run the churches as business enterprises selling the gospel. Thus leading a luxurious living is seen more an asset rather than something to be shunned -- because it shows that God rewards the believers -- which is the simple massage they preach through showbiz presentations.
City Harvest founder 47-year old senior pastor Kong Hee owns a fashion retailer and corporate training outfit. His Los Angeles based 40 year old pop star wife Sun Ho -- who has produced many sexy music videos and dance hits in the U.S. -- lives in a Hollywood Hills apartment rented at US$ 28,000 a month. Pastor Hee lives in a luxury apartment here said to be worth S$ 2.6 million and he flies to Los Angeles every week after preaching on Sundays to see the wife and his 5 year old son.
Another mega-church is New Creation Church (NCC) which has a membership of 20,000. It owns five businesses including an entertainment and rock production company, child development centres, gift and book shops and a travel company. In 2007 their business arm Rock Productions teamed up with property giant CapitaLand to build a S$ 1 billion lifestyle hub in the city state.
NCC's founder senior pastor Joseph Prince is reportedly earning an annual income in access of S$ 500,000. He preaches a simple message that believers are "greatly blessed, highly favoured and deeply loved" by God and when Christians grasp the full extent of God's grace, they will fall out of love with sin and live the right life. Through TV channels, books, videos, DVDs and Mp3, he resonates this message in some 150 countries.
Faith Community Baptist Church (FCBC) is another mage-church with over 10,000 members and its founder 57 year old senior pastor Lawrence Khong comes from a wealthy commodity trading family. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration degree and Master of Theology. He has been a pioneer in church performing arts even using magic shows to preach the gospel.
The Straits Times (ST) newspaper published a 6-page special analysis of the mega-churches in Singapore early July which reflected that many pastors of the large churches rely more on their business administration degrees rather than theology to guide the churches.
In an interview with the newspaper, theologian Roland Chia lamented that equating pastors with CEO has come about because the churches now see themselves more as a business. "Each local church is seen as a franchise with a core product to sell, namely the Gospel," he noted. "What the church needs, according to proponents of this paradigm, is not so much people with MDivs (Mater of Divinity) but those with MBAs".
But the mega-churches argue that the showbiz and business orientation gives the churches a distinct market-edge in spreading message to youth in particular. They say that the prosperity gospel -- centred on the notion that God blesses believers with riches -- holds particular appeal. They point out that they have been able to give youth self-esteem and make them motivated to achieve success, be it in their studies or professions.
"Singapore is big on excellence and professionalism," says sociologist Mathew Mathew, a visiting affiliate with the Asia Research Institute here. "The mega-church model is a very tight system, from professional ushering to sound system set-ups." Thus, he told ST that the sense of being part of a success story is seductive to many, and "Megas have successfully revolutionalised the image of Christianity -- making it trendy, cool, and market-savy, especially to the young".
New Creation Church's deacon Jack Neo argues that though showbiz presentations of their services don't come cheap. Yet it is an investment in excellence. "As church grows, you want to maintain a certain level of competence" he says. "Ask yourself, what is the gospel? It's good news, and the good news makes you feel good, and the good news is Jesus."
The ST analysis also pointed out that the mega-churches have been uncritically pro-Singaporean and pro-government. An unnamed theologian was quoted saying: "I suspect that this is mainly due to the fact that the undisputed success of the Singapore Government and the affluence of our society are perfectly in sync with the prosperity doctrine of the mega-churches."
But, the Singapore government has been, somewhat reluctantly, forced to act to investigate these churches in this multicultural society which is made up of Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians, when public discontent simmering under the surface regarding aggressive proselytising came to the boil in March 2009 when members of a Christian evangelical church tried to take over the country's oldest women's lobby group AWARE. These Christians accused the group of promoting homosexuality.
Buddhists, Muslims, Taoists, Hindus and liberal Christians mobilised to retake control of AWARE and expose the intolerance of the evangelical Christians of different viewpoints and faiths. Recently two Christian pastors of mega-churches were pulled up by the government intelligence services for disrespectful comments they have posted on websites about Taoists and Buddhists.
New Creationist Church pastor Mark Ng, was pulled up for an audio clip posted on YouTube, where he compared praying to Taoist deities to "seeking protection from secret society gangsters". He later apologised to the Taoists.
In February 2010, founder of Lighthouse Evangelical Church Ronald Tan, was hauled up and censured by the Internal Security Department for making insensitive comments about Buddhist and Taoist beliefs such as re-incarnation and nirvana. The senior Pastor later apologised for his remarks, but not before the issue sparked massive debate in multi-faith, multi-religious Singapore.
In an ST editorial last month questioning the intolerance of some evangelical Christian churches towards other religions, it asked whether this is due to their ignorance of other faiths. "If this is indeed the case, preachers in their training will benefit from a study of anthropology and comparative religion, aside from their own" the editorial recommended.
Perhaps one may also recommend that these subjects should be included in MBA courses today as well.
*Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lankan born journalist, radio broadcaster, television documentary maker and an international communications analyst. He currently works as the Head of Research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) in Singapore. (IDN-InDepthNews/24.07.2010)
2010 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters
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Kalinga Seneviratne's previous IDN articles:
http://www.indepthnews.net/news/news.php?key1=2010-06-26%2023:19:48&key2=1
http://www.indepthnews.net/news/news.php?key1=2010-06-16%2015:49:29&key2=1
External links:
http://www.chc.org.sg
http://www.newcreation.org.sg
http://www.straitstimes.com
http://www.fcbc.org.sg
http://www.lighthouse.org.sg
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