This is part 2 of a 4 part series. You can also read Part 1.

Winter 2008

Enter Winter 2008. My first time working in Waterloo, and my first time staying in Waterloo for more than four months. By this time, I was fairly comfortable with the fellowship. Having led at least a few small groups during the Fall 2007 term, I was approached if I wanted to colead a small group for the winter retreat. I agreed, and thus attended the winter retreat.

By this point in time, something in me had already been noticing subtle differences between my home "denomination" (which I now would term as charismatic or neo-charismatic, even though in the past I would suggest as non-denominational) and that of the majority of UWCCF members (evangelical, alliance or baptist). I don't quite really remember what aspect of it, but I know that I had expressed some of my thoughts about this to one of the committee members. Nevertheless, he encouraged me, and I suppose I had left it at that.

Attending the winter retreat was a sort of further encouragement in this sense. The reasons particularly were two fold. Firstly, one of the frosh who I had met the previous term was leading worship and comes from a Pentecostal background, which in the spectrum of denominations is closer to charismatic than it is to evangelical. Not to say that one style of worship is necessarily better than another, but for myself, I was greatly refreshed and encouraged by the more spontaneous style of worship that he led. It was a great encouragement to see someone else with a desire for free worship in UWCCF.

Secondly, the speaker for that retreat ran a workshop about the more charismatic or pentecostal concept of hearing God's voice. This was a fairly large encouragement for me in itself because it served as a reminder about the good that is present in my denomination. Moreover, it was extremely encouraging to have this topic taught about from an outside source, who was trusted by and brought in by an evangelical UWCCF member.

In addition to the encouragement and challenge that came from the winter retreat, I had also brought myself to volunteer to oversee the Sunday night prayer ministry for that term. This was stemmed out of a greater desire to pray with and for the fellowship and its members. To me, prayer is a very powerful and important aspect of our faith, and I see it as a great potential to glorify God and to encourage each other through it.

This role provided me with sufficient challenge in stepping up and leading.

But close to the end of the term, an even greater challenge was presented to me in the form of the question, "Have you ever considered running for CCF committee?"

When initially asked the question, I kind of laughed it off and replied that no, I hadn't. It wasn't something I was sure was for me. But slowly, I was approached by a few other people, including some of the older members of the fellowship. I then began to consider it more seriously and somehow came to the conclusion that I would.

I felt a desire to see the members of the fellowship really know God in a deeper and more intimate way. Something beyond head knowledge and something beyond what they had already seen. In essence, I felt that there was an aspect of the Father's heart, which the members in the fellowship hadn't yet tasted. I wanted to somehow encourage people to push for that. To push deeper into the Father's heart.

Before I knew it, I was sitting in the 3rd floor SLC prayer room surrounded by a relatively large chunk of the fellowship for the "meet and greet" night (or perhaps should I call it "hazing and trial by fire" ... joking...). The purpose of the night was to allow an open forum for fellowship members to question committee candidates in an effort to help people make more informed decisions during the election process. A good idea in theory, but perhaps poorly implemented as it was born out of a fear of repeating some fellowship drama that occured the year prior. Some of the questions that came up carried an air of "we don't trust you." Because I did not have prior understanding of why the meet and greet came about, I was quite taken a back by the whole ordeal and discouraged greatly.

As a part of the questioning, it came to light that there was a rare possibility that I would not actually be present in Waterloo during my elected year due to co-op and my upcoming exchange to Singapore. This seemed to tweak some people out (perhaps for understandable reasons considering my current knowledge of what happened the year's prior committee) and scared me quite a bit at the prospect of how I would balance between my responsibility to the fellowship versus my responsibility to myself and education.

My initial personal response to this question for myself was one out of blind faith in that God would take care of it. He had never let me down in the past, and I was certain that He would work things out for His glory in the end. But some how, this answer wasn't enough for even the most respected of UWCCF members at that time.

A couple more questions came up at the end of the night, which shook me further.

By the end of everything, I wasn't sure what I should be doing anymore. And part of this shook me enough that I kind of forgot my focus for why I wanted to run for committee in the first place.

And as such, it was with this heavy burden of finding work in Waterloo for my Fall 2008 term that I entered my 3B term in Spring 2008.

Continue to Part 3