Out of concern some friends have asked how we are coping.

Well, Vineyard generally does not provide any financial support for their pastors. They are expected to be bi-vocational or “tent makers” like the Apostle Paul. Additionally, they are encouraged during the church planting phase to try on their own to obtain financial sponsors for their ministry.

When we started our house church in early 2003 we had accepted the challenge of being bi-vocational, or “tent makers”. Therefore it was helpful that the year (2003) began on an optimistic note. Lye Heng was able to sign up a number of consulting / business coaching contracts. There was also strong expectation of Lye Heng getting approval to work with the youths at Christ Methodist, as a part time ministry staff.

However as the year drew to a close, the situation had altered somewhat. Due to the horrible economic climate, the consulting work quickly dried up. The part time ministry work with the youths did not materialize. We have had to explore how to further simplify our living.

The idea of starting a home cleaning business came up in November 2003. We had mixed feelings about it. I had no illusions about how hard the work would involve! You have to be ready to get down to do the scrubbing yourself. But there was a need to generate more income for the family.

Home cleaning workers are generally known to be unmotivated and unreliable. The work of getting work out of them would not be easy at all.

The business would be labor intensive and the challenges would be how to scale up business and operations, maintain quality, get and maintain a good gross margin for the service offered. Competition and pressure on price traditionally came from older, displaced self-employed workers, or firms just acting as placement agents and deploying low skilled and un-supervised foreigner workers, say from China. This business would not make us rich quickly!

December 2003 our first month in business, turned out to be a relatively busy period. We had to spend quite a lot of time on it because we were on the learning curve.

But it must have been disconcerting for our people to suddenly see their pastors talking about business plans and revenue models, more than sharing the word and praying with them. As pastors we were challenged to walk the talk. We were teaching about prioritizing devotional time (QT) and warned about how good things, which comes from God (like family, careers and business) could become idols in our lives.

It was a good reminder for Lye Heng and I that values are caught not taught and we had the opportunity to model kingdom values.

I had an encounter of the worst kind, which happened in one of our first jobs.

The home had a large altar table with red lamps, an array of ancestral tablets and pictures of household gods. In the normal course of work, we would be required to clean this altar. I had felt uncomfortable about having to clean it but nonetheless, accepted the job. I could not ask the other ladies, including a worker from China to do something that I was unable to carry out. As it turned out Lye Heng came to the rescue and took over the cleaning of the altar.

I was particularly worn down dealing with the owners of this house. We had worked almost the entire day there. Being inexperienced, we had under-quoted, which meant they really got a good deal from us. Yet the owners kept us back working till it was very late, with more and more request of things to be cleaned. They were so inconsiderate. It seemed unfair and I felt exploited. I broke down and cried. My co-workers from church were wonderfully encouraging, when they found out that I was not a superwoman but vulnerable and weak.

Who are our workers? I suggested earlier that they are the kind of people who don’t have many other work opportunities. Our target is 100 regular cleaning contracts and this could generate full time employment for up to 15 people not counting a pool of ad-hoc workers, whom we can give work from time to time.

We are transparent to our workers about our faith. They know our desire to deliver value to our clients – homes like our own. We will train them and treat them fairly, especially what we pay. We will work them hard but we work along aside them. And we are sincere about wanting to create opportunities for steady income and employing them on full time basis as soon as possible.

Our approach to outreach is simple, one at a time, and watching to see if the Holy Spirit is at work and we are to join Him in the work.