Community

I have been at the same congregation — Indonesian Evangelical Church, in San Jose — for about six years. Most of what I do there runs on a schedule.

Leading worship

Two or three Sundays a month. Here is what the week actually looks like.

I get the topic of Sunday’s sermon a week out. I read the passage it comes from, sometimes a commentary on it, and then I pick four songs — which happens on an evening walk, with Spotify feeding me worship sets, after praying about it. It is not an efficient process and I have not found a better one.

The list goes out around Tuesday, to three different groups: the musicians, the person who prepares the chords, and the AV team. We do a short devotional and run the set on Friday night after fellowship, or on Saturday morning. On Sunday we are in the building at nine for a ten o’clock service.

I do not play any instruments. I sing, and I lead the congregation through the structure of the service. Who I have with me is not up to me; our music coordinator assigns the team from whoever is free. On a good week there are five of us: me, a guitarist who also sings, a pianist who also sings, a drummer and a bassist. On a thin week there are two — me and whoever could make it.

The care team

I coordinate it. There is a WhatsApp group and a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is the job: a monthly ushering rota built around when people are actually available, which is usually the same week each month, plus the reshuffling when somebody’s week falls apart on a Thursday.

What the team does is greet people who are new and introduce them to the members of the church who are better at this than we are. I am an introvert who pushes himself to greet new people with love. The rota is there so that it happens on the mornings I do not feel like it.

Young adults

I was on the core leadership team for four years, from 2021 to 2024. The work was mostly deciding what the group actually needed — what to cover, what to run — for the particular set of people who were in it that year.

The hard part was the year after COVID, when there were ten or fifteen of us. When you do not have enough leaders you have to close things, and choosing which things is not a pleasant meeting. I argued to keep the food ministry. I was not neutral about it and I would not pretend otherwise.

More people came back each year and most of them stayed, which had far more to do with our pastor and how much he keeps in touch with people than with anything the rest of us decided in a meeting.

Tuesday

Pickleball, seven in the evening, in the parking lot behind the church. The lot is empty on Tuesdays, so at some point the church painted a court on it. There is a net and a set of spare paddles for whoever turns up without one.

Four people is the minimum, and we have never failed to get four. When people feel like being out, it is ten or twelve. It ends around ten, and some of us drive five minutes for birria tacos afterwards.

The shelter

Lifemoves runs quarterly and I coordinate two of them a year.

Six or seven of us buy the food at Costco around one on a Saturday, cook it in the shelter kitchen on Julian Street, and serve about sixty people at seven. Some of us sit down and eat with them. Then we wash the pots.

The menu has stopped changing: rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, stir fried broccoli, fresh garlic bread. When you have done a thing enough times it acquires a default.