I had an awesome time attending two consecutive welcoming nights for the past two days, organised by CGBC Campus Connect (7 June) and UTAR CF (8 June) resepctively. Both welcoming nights were to give warm welcomes to the freshies who have just came to UTAR and Kampar. Let me highlight about both events.
CGBC Welcoming Night
To kickstart the new semester, Campus Connect has organised a welcoming night using the theme of FIFA Fiesta, since the World Cup 2010 is just around the corner (in fact, it will start 2 days from now till 11 July). Sis Mun Yee and a few other brothers and sisters were involved in the organisation of the event. Everything has been planned well and there were lots of exciting activities awaiting those who attended the night. There were flags pasted on the walls of the church and all those flags were the 32 countries who have qualified for the tournament including defending champions Italy.
A few days before the event took place, preparation works have been done including decoration of the church which involved painting the flags on round-shaped cut-out cardboards. Apart from that, there was a skit practice by the team who have went to Sarawak for mission trip last month during the semester break.
On the day itself, several brothers and sisters were there early to make final preparation before the event. By 7pm, guests started coming in and there were quite a lot of new faces turning up for the event. Some members even had flags painted on their faces and the painting work was done by PC and KLynn before the start of the event. Approaching the night, more and more people were there for the exciting event.
Adeline and Kelvin Tan were the emcees for the night. They welcomed everyone and thanked them for coming. Then, PC gave her welcoming speech before the time was handed over to Kai Jun for ice-breaking sessions. Everyone participated in the games introduced by Kai Jun. The games were quite simple nevertheless everyone had a great time, though KJ has been cracking his head for games which has relation to football.
Then, it's time for worship after everyone has warmed up through the ice-breaking session. Jialing was in charge of praise and worship session and she led the crowd to a few songs. After that, the Sarawak mission trip team was on stage where they performed a skit with the title Set Me Free. The cast was none other than those who spent one week in Sarawak, spreading the gospel to the Iban people there. However, there were some replacement as the four sisters from CGBC Ipoh who joined in the trip were being replaced by other CGBC members. Anyway great performance from them as they have spent time practising the skit the previous night.
Up next, it's time for testimony sharing. Yu Shia and Richard were called forward to give their own testimonies about how God came into their life and changed their lives. After that, it's the moment that everyone has been waiting for---time to MAKAN!! There were a lot of food served. Pizza, sandwiches, tidbits and a football cake with lots of small flags on top. Everyone had time interacting and fellowshipping with one another. After some time, those who were there started leaving for their respective homes, preparing for the next day.
UTAR CF Welcoming Night
It was held at the Grand Kampar Hotel again this time, just like the previous semester. This time, several churches were involved in serving in different section of the event, for example Chinese Methodist Church in ushering, FGA in ice-breaker, Hope Church in registration.
The purpose of CF organising this event was to welcome the new freshies and also to introduce the churches available in Kampar to them. Many people turned up for the event.... freshies, representatives from churches and exisiting CF members. After getting themselves registered, all these people proceeded into the gathering hall where the event was held.
When everyone has settled themselves, the night began with MCs Gin Mah and Felicia Grace addressed everyone with a warm welcome. After that, both of them acknowledged the presence of representatives of different churches around Kampar by calling the names one by one. Besides this, representatives of the newly formed Catholic Students Society were in out midst as well. Glad that they were able to join us.
Then, it's time for some ice-breaking session with Mindy from FGA was in charge of the session. She played a footwear game which everyone has to take off their footwear and placed them on a certain spot. This sounds familiar to me as in the previous welcoming night held during last semester, a similar game was played. Then everyone has to get two different types of footwear and started to look for not the owner but another person who has another side of the footwear. Everyone should be connected in a circle in the end but somehow everyone managed to match the shoes together, though the circle was not properly formed.
Alright, everyone's back to their seats and what's next? The MCs asked if anyone knew what's the next agenda. One brother answered "Makan time!" That's right, we had our first round of food first before the night continued. GKH has prepared fried rice and fried noodles for everyone and everyone had their turns to take the food. Later, fellowship took place as everyone went around to get to know one another. At this time, freshies approached to the booths available there to find out more about the churches and their weekly activities.
After that, it's time for singing praises to the Lord. Ray Leong, Shirley Kwong, Jensen Chen and Wendy Lee led the congregation into a string of worship songs, starting with Hari Ini and ending with Spirit Touch Your Church. It was indeed good to see Christians worshipping the Almighty God together. Later, the current CF president Kelvin Wong gave his welcoming speech. He used a quotation by Eric Ong, the previous president, in delivering his speech. Eric Ong has said that "Thou shall rock Kampar" and later it is added that we CFers should rock UTAR as well. Kelvin quoted this in his speech and added something else to it. This is what he said, "In order to rock Kampar and Utar, you must first rock yourself." I agree with what he said, in order to make a dfference and win Utar for Christ, we as CFers must first take the initiative to change ourselves first and commit ourselves to Chirst before we can change others and win more souls for Christ. Well said, Kelvin!
Later, our beloved CF advisor Mr K delivered his speech as well. In his speech, he highlighted a few things including the CF camp and the joint Christmas celebration. The camp is held from 12-15 Oct and the venue is in Port Dickson.and The theme for this camp is Spiritual Compass, "a compass with an arrow that points to our Abba Father" (Jensen, 2010). In a dilemma again cos CC camp is from 15-17 Oct with the theme of Purpose Driven Life Game. The similar situation has occured again where I have to make another wise choice of which camp to attend, just like last year where I was forced to choose between CGBC Amazing Race camp and CF We Are One camp. Last year, I made a right choice by going to join my fellow Connectors in the Amazing Race camp. I hope I can do the same for this time as well. Tough choice but I'm going to make decision of what camp to go at the end of this semester.
Another thing Mr K mentioned was the Christmas celebration 2010 which will be held at the Heritage Hall in November. This is an interesting event which "brings people to one of the fundamentals of Christianity, the worship to the Lord, for the angels sing with and praise God on high with harps and lyres" (Shu, 2010). Mr K asked if everyone is willingly volunteering themselves for the organisation of the wonderful event and several brave souls including a few freshies, stood up in response. Later they were handed a survey form where they have to choose in which areas they would like to offer their service. Really looking forward for this event, even though I'll be enjoying my 3-months long semester break and doing my FYP during the break. But hopefully I can make it for the event.
After Mr K has ended his speech, he called upon Pastor Nicky of Praise Community Centre for the closing prayer before everyone was dismissed. A slideshow of information of the churches around Kampar was displayed Besides that, refreshed was served as well. Some people started leaving while some stayed back for more fellowship. The CF committee members had a meeting before they went home.
Alright, that's all I wanna say about the 2 exciting activities. I really enjoyed myself during these two nights, although I was tired and exhausted. I didn't really snap much photos for both the events. Sorry no photos to show this time. If u wanna see photos of these 2 events, check out Facebook for those photos which I was tagged in some of the photos. Thanks and have a nice day.
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