From June, we start our offline Sunday Services in the church. We have planned to take 50 people initially and slowly increase the number. Before we do so, we are currently holding our last online Café Talk. Rather than creating additional church-wide online meetings during the pandemic, we decided to focus more on our services and cell groups – because I was afraid that more meetings would intervene with building our personal relationship with God. But each cell group still voluntarily held prayer or bible reading meetings as they saw fit.

The one meeting that we did however create and prepare church-wide was Café Talk. The reason for this was because we recognised the difficulty in getting to know members of the church outside cell groups, especially since we had a lot of people, especially students, come and go each year. With Covid-19, many students in our congregation had to return to Korea, which reduced our numbers. That made me think that it would be good for the remaining members, who had been at the church for a while, to get to know each other. So we decided to hold Café Talk – named as such in the hope that we would be able to talk in a relaxed atmosphere, as if we were all in a Café.

For the first Café Talk, we created groups based on proximity; for the second, we based it on age. This time, we created groups based on major and sector of work. Compared to the first two, this one took more effort – it was hard to ensure that every member had a sector that they could fit into. Some individuals had interests outside of the work they did; some people had majored in rather niche areas. If we didn’t have enough numbers, or a leader to lead that group, we weren’t able to form a group at all.

The areas that we settled for in the end were: classical music, performance/music, education, academics, finance/economics/accounting, fine arts, design/practical arts/illustration, fashion/make-up/design, marketing/advertisements, media, IT, general work/labs, international relations, construction, law, psychology/therapy, medical, family. 155 members of our church in total participated.

I would like for these meetings to continue voluntarily even after Café Talk ends. I really hope that it will grow to be a group that supports us to live as Christians even outside the church. The church has been called by God to be set aside from this world, but it is also an organisation that has been called to serve and renew the world. God created man and invited him to a personal relationship with him, but also asked him to rule over the world. God had a plan for each sector when he created them; I would like for us to learn about them through the bible, compare that to how the world has distorted them, and discuss and create a manual as to how we can deal with and change such matters as Christians.

I was grateful for the opportunity that the last three Café Talks presented for our congregation to get to know each other outside of their cell groups. I really hope that our congregation will continue to be built up both inside and outside the church.