After the pastoral staff meeting today which dragged into lunch time, I went to the pantry to make myself a cup of Milo to go with my biscuits because I was too lazy to get out to buy lunch. Pr. Suat was there. "So how did the conference go? How was the hotel?" I asked.

Apparently the hotel was horrible. "Did you know how it was when you booked it????"

"Of course not," I replied without batting an eyelid, "I can't really tell. Their promo on the net looks great and I booked according to our specs." And by way of cheap and good, we just had to take our chances with Geylang... so with sending a team of twelve who stayed a week there, I guess we saved a bit.

At least a couple of the men received propositions from the women who hung around the lobby and streets. Such a pity that we had not anticipated it and given a stack of our evangelistic brochures to our team so they could give out to the prostitutes and pimps. You can never underestimate how the word of God will work when it is received by a hungry soul. It was a bit funny our conversation veered off and focused on the lost opportunity instead.

"So how was the conference and did you learn anything new?" I persisted.

They had gone to Singapore to attend the cell church conference run by a church with membership of 5,000 people.

"No, nothing much. Actually I would say I learnt nothing new. All the things that were taught were just refreshers of what I already know, just repackaged."

One thing we discussed struck me. What is cell church about? It is about having a pastoral heart. It is about caring. You don't need to go to a conference to learn about caring because caring comes from the heart. God has already given it to us. Mothers and Fathers have a pastoral heart. In fact you don't even need to be a Christian to know about it. When you have a pastoral heart, you automatically care about a person. You want to know about the little inconsequential things. You want to know what they did, what they ate. You want to provide for your child a roof over his head, provide training for him to be independent, protection, clothing, the best college, you want to know how much it costs, how good it is for your beloved. Similarly when you are a pastor or a church leader and you have a pastoral heart over the people you lead, you are just as concerned over them as your children in little things. How are you today? How is that problem that we prayed for? How is your child? How is your job? We are interested in the little things in their lives. We expend our energy on them. We love them.

When you have a pastoral heart towards your people, there is really little these conferences can teach you because you are doing them already. But of course they do serve a great purpose because there are too many pastors and leaders who do not have a pastoral heart and so following all the steps and methods maaaay lead or teach them to develop a pastoral heart eventually. We had a good laugh over this, over many people's expense if I may add. Oh, the wickedness.

Sometimes we spend so much time and energy doing so many great and efficient and impressive programs and we forget to understand that impression of a church is vastly different from the temperature of a church. You can ascertain almost immediately the former when you step into either a small or a mega church but you cannot really know the temperature of a church until you stay with it at least a few months, get into the culture and know its people. Ultimately, people will be able to discern what they prefer and keep coming when we are warm and loving. We can package the new ever so nicely but it is the old values that are more enduring and appealing in the long run.