Would you help me take the students on a walk down memory lane to give thanks to God for where we've come from and the small part we played in the story He was telling through Geylang's red-light district?
"The peanut should not forget its skin," goes an old Malay proverb. With all this talk about higher education, thesis defence, matriculation, and graduation, it might be a good reminder to put everything in proper perspective—in the context of the spiritual and legal authority we received from heaven during the early days of the university, when the only classroom was the streets and our first students were mainly victims of trauma.
A shortcut to our history can be found in the two parts of our postal code. The first three digits, 389, is the country code of Macedonia (+389). As Bible students of Paul's missionary journey know, this is where it all began—at Troas in a vision in the night that launched him on an intercontinental voyage across the seas into Europe, especially Philippi, where the Spirit moved powerfully on a jailer and his "whole household" (Acts 16:31).
The second three digits, 247, signify the paradigm shift from Sunday-only to an basecamp 24 x7 x 365 model as it is to this day: Miracle Monday, Thankful Tuesday, Wisdom Wednesday, Talk-about Thursday, Fill-me-up Friday, Set-apart Saturday, Set-free Sunday—that is, "everyday Jesus."
This was the world ☝️you would have experienced back in 2005, before and after we got the keys to our Geylang basecamp at 175a/b Geylang Road S(389247). The streets have since been cleaned up, the laws changed, and the emphasis in our ministry has pivoted from anti-vice to a pro-family stance.
But this is not the case in many other parts of Asia. It is a testimony to teams of volunteers who walked the Geylang streets for the better part of a decade from 2005–2015, when things started to taper down considerably. The old magic of the walking street days had died, and we had to find other things to do with our time. We had prayed ourselves out of a job.
We were not the first in Geylang. Around 60 churches were already active there before us in 2005—Catholics and Protestants, tongue-speakers and Bible-thumpers, local and international parachurch organizations. High Point was run by George Butron. We hosted Peter and Donna Jordan from YWAM in British Columbia, along with the local YWAM Singapore teams. I was one of the trainers in their street ministry. Health Serve, led by Goh Wei Leong, provided low-cost medical checkups. Tamar by Mercy and Ras organized follow-up for the Thai girls. Hagar, led by Michael Chiam, worked with the Singapore government on migrant and labor issues. Scarlet Web conducted prayer patrols incognito with Greg Vijayendran and Cheryl, and Tim Weerasekera with Anita Duplesis, who later started Freedom Port Alliance doing prayer patrols at the Cape Town airport. Edwin Koh represented OMF Singapore and is currently serving in Turkey. Besides these, many unsung heroes reached out to construction workers from Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and elsewhere.
We organized a cricket match for the Commonwealth nations and wondered why they kept playing in the pouring rain. Later we discovered the workers had started placing bets on the winner, so we had to stop that outreach. We encountered 12 different Asian dialects besides the Filipinas at Orchard Towers. Tamil, Telugu, Kerala, and Malayalam could be heard from Lor-12 to Jalan Molech. Girls came from as far north as Harbin speaking Mandarin, from northern Thailand, and Vietnam, including KTV lounge hostesses and some girls from South America (Argentina) doing part-time work on the streets looking for gullible CPF uncles. The government allowed it but kept a close watch on the pimps and operators, many of whom had been evangelized by PFI and other groups. They called us the "hallelujah people" and thought our nightly visits brought them "good luck" with police raids—good for business. Within the red-light district boundaries delineated since British colonial days (Kallang-Lavender-Geylang, formerly Bugis), police cameras appeared on every other lamp pole. After the Little India riots in 2013, liquor control laws came into effect, along with heavy penalties for human trafficking. Everything has gone underground nowadays.
By the 2010s, multitudes of Christian intercessors, a deluge of charitable sisters and street chaplains arrived. Nobody asked "what church?" or "what formation?" It was a joy to break bread with the Anglicans, Methodists, Franciscans, and Baptists. Presbyterians came later. Only Fr. Bruno from the Jesuits, who was posted at OLPS at the time, refused to have communion with us. He has since returned to France, but we had no problem with the Franciscans in their brown robes, including Fr. John Wong OFM. I learned later from some YWAMers that the Holy Spirit was falling upon the inmates in Changi Prison around that same time. There seems to be, to this day, a very real, profound, and spiritual connection between Changi and Geylang—beyond just geography and physicality.
Pastor Joseph Tan from FCBC attended our Free School graduation with the Chinese prostitutes from as far as Inner Mongolia. He reported being in Geylang for 10 years prior (1995–2005) without seeing any apparent "results." Later he was reassigned to Bandar Aceh to deal with the fallout from the Asian tsunami. Wee Lay Chin and her teams from St. Andrew's Cathedral, Agnes and Cecilia (Ee sisters) from Holy Family, Katong, and Sr. Mary Soh and the FMM from Holy Angels, Bukit Batok were mobilized. Even the Vatican, through their nuncio at the Waterloo Street embassy, sent 40 priests and nuns from Rome, and we sent them out two by two into the back lanes and alleyways between Lor-12 and Lor-21. What a motley crew we were in those days—the charismaniacs together with the rosary-carrying clerics in their robes and crosses!
International Missions: