By the grace of God, and kindness of a friend, I went to Google office, Singapore last Tuesday. let’s put aside great buffet food and good coffee, good ice cream, super nice salad bar, super nice dessert bar, but just let put each of those things aside for a moment. the atmosphere there is the main “attraction”. WORK and PLAY is their concept, I don’t like it just because it has the word PLAY in it, I like it because the concept brought alive by the office.

half of the site is allocated for PLAY area, there’s a pool table, ping pong table, basketball machine, pinball machine, Lego, etc. and every a few meter square of offices there is “social room”, pantry with coffee machine and cold drinks, sandwich bar, and sometimes there’s barista too. I do fancy foods and soft drinks, but this is not about that!

this is about how the new things, new paradigm, new approaches are being applied. I just don’t get how this all can happen in an eastern country that just full of superstitious. I mean, I know it’s Singapore. Singapore is banana, yellow on the outside and white on the inside (east on the outlook but west on the mind). but still, Singapore is an eastern country where the work ethics are rooted deep as a fundamental of modern Singapore. “work and play? are you crazy? work is work lar! no time to play! later when you rich can go play all the way !” that would be the normal response. 

how can this culture “work and play” really work? and how did google start it? well, Google starts as an idea with minimum resources. what they believe is whats makes them different from others. they believe that treating people well is more important than making a lot of money. they believe that different people should be treated differently. for examples, there are treadmills in the engineer’s office, how come? because the engineer ( perhaps that particular engineer) likes to work on the treadmill. it isn’t about giving people what they want. it’s giving people what motorize them to do more. it’s about to INSPIRE them and creates an environment that triggers them to grow. that’s what I’m talking about! 

because they focus on people and it’s potentials, they put all efforts to make the people happy. happy leads to creative thinking, creative leads to productivity (on Google scale). because Google understands that the most valuable assets are not money (nor buildings, system, procedure, etc) but people. 

let me bring this to church terms, the church is the visualization of Jesus’s activity when He walked on Earth. His disciples decided (sure glad they did that) to form a fellowship that can sustain the people who believe in Jesus. sustain the believer ! not to sustain the church, or the apostles, or even the Jews tradition. its to sustain the believers !! people ! out of compassion, Jesus walked on this Earth and ministered to the sinners. out of compassion, the church should do the same. since it’s the vision in the first place. For the first time, the apostles put down the foundation of the church. the church should answer to the people’s need and empower them to do the same to others, until eventually to the end of the world.

I am writing this because I really really REALLY concern about how we as the church hit the wall so many times because we missed it. we miss the point of having people to empower and to inspire, and to lead them to find their true potentials in life. most of the time we forgot how people (volunteers) are the essential part of the church, we start to make them work (minister) work and work and never make them play (empower, inspire, trigger them to grow), and we get upset coz the committee keep changing people and why they never want to work again. I think we should learn to Google this time. I’m in for a google church, who’s with me?

was posted on July 10th, 2015