This is my first year attending Chinese Christian Fellowship (CCF) at Rutgers University, even though it’s already my third year here.
It’s not just my first time attending CCF, but also my first time attending a large-group fellowship at Rutgers. I had only gone to my church small group (shoutout to R8) my first two years. I had been stubborn or scared of mingling with and opening myself up to a larger group of people I didn’t know.
This year, R8 moved their meeting time from Tuesday to Friday night. However, I spend time on Fridays with our church middle schoolers at youth group, so I couldn’t go to R8 anymore. Even though I miss the fellowship with R8, it pushed me to go to another fellowship. That fellowship was CCF (Also, I still see my R8 friends at church every week!).
To be honest, it was the large group that fit my schedule (and ethnicity) best. Also, I had a couple of old friends from church who not only regularly attended but were serving. I had even become friends with the president that summer at a youth retreat. At first I said I would visit and stay for the semester… that I was probably only going to stay due to “schedule conflicts” and that things may change next semester. I was clouded with doubts and filled with with fear of commitment.
Then I realized something. I’ve always stood very strong in my opinion on church commitment. I think church is all about committing to fellowship, relationships, and serving, not necessarily just the music, the messages, and the programs. And there I was, scared to commit to a fellowship because I was scared of opening up to a new group of people. I was acting against my own opinion.
All Christians struggle with the same things. We struggle with sin: pride, lust, hatred, addiction… I can stand there judging others of these things while I’m guilty of the exact same sin (Matthew 7:3-5).
And as soon as I committed to regular attendance and also to making an effort to open up to others and start new relationships did I get to experience a whole new blessing of a new Christ-centered community at college.
Now I am definitely not saying that CCF is “the fellowship to be at.” All fellowships have their outward pros and cons. However, what makes fellowship so great is Christ and the love He has shown us to show each other. Prepared for ups as well as downs, I’ve found a new community- another home for my last year and a half at Rutgers University.
I’m not staying because of the wonderful speakers that we get to hear or the plethora of musical talent the praise team has during large group. I’m not staying because of the events where we get to hang out.
I’m staying because of the people I have started relationships with.
One of the most recent examples of opening up to others was filming a video with our junior class for an annual CCF Christmas Dinner. I got to share a very small snippet of this story at the end 🙂
This is the video we made. Inspired by Dude Perfect’s pick up basketball stereotypes video on youtube, we decided to make a video of a couple of college stereotypes to show how our joy in Christ is through the good, the bad, and the routine things in life.
During the summer, I was able to befriend a kid named Joey as part of a media ministry team at Rutgers. He is a praise leader and coordinator at CCF. He had also filmed and edited a very large majority of our graduating class’ videos the last two years. Joey was super cool and let me take a large part in this year’s video.
Joey was super cool and let me take a large part in this year’s video with him. Helping with this year’s video not only gave me an opportunity film other CCF students in my grade, but get to know them more. Not just their name and their major, but also their personalities because of the extended interaction we got to have.
The following are pictures that I got to take during filming. A small behind-the-scenes of sort.
Matthew Lau 