7 Questions In this regular feature, we get to know someone by their answers to “7 Questions”. In this issue, we feature Elder Ernest Chew. Elder Ernest Chew taught History for nearly 40 years at the University of Singapore/National University of Singapore, where he was Head of the History Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He is now an Associate Senior Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Elder Ernest is also the founding chairman of the University Staff Christian Fellowship, and he serves on the Boards of several organizations like EFOS, St. Luke’s Hospital, the Bible Society, and the Singapore Bible College. He and his wife, Aileen, have three grown-up children (Alistair, Emrys & Alethea), and two grand-children (Mariel & Andrew).
Before you became Advisor y Elder in May 2013, you had been an Executive Elder in BFEC for many years. What were your initial thoughts in becoming one? After returning from my graduate studies in the UK in 1970 and becoming a History lecturer at the University of Singapore, I became a Deacon of BFEC and participated in drafting our constitution statement of faith, and missions policy. In 1976 I was appointed an Elder. I had already become Chairman of the Discipleship Training Centre Council, and was chairing Campus Crusade’s “Here’s Life, Singapore” evangelistic campaign, and felt the Lord’s leading to keep BFEC connected with wider Kingdom concerns and para-church work. Christian historian, the late Professor Sir Herbert Butterfield (whom I met in Cambridge) once wrote: “I am unable to see how a man can find the hand of God
in secular history, unless he has first found that he has an assurance of it in his personal experience”. Such a personal assurance of the Lord of History led me to become a professional historian. One of your favourite quotes is by Soren Kierkegaard “Life can only be lived for wards:but can only be understood backwards.” Please tell us why and how it is special to you. Kierkegaard was a Danish Christian existentialist philosopher who saw the connection between past, present and future, that we can only live forwards if we have some understanding of the past. We can make the most of the present; and better envision the future, only if we have a biblical perspective of history and thus of our own identity in relation to God and the world. Tell us one specific event that greatly contributed to your spiritual formation. 9
When I was in my early teens, a turning-point was a message at Bethesda (Katong) by Mr J.Oswald Sanders on Romans 6:1-2 “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid!” This changed me from a professing Christian, presuming on grace, into a committed disciple of Christ, saved by grace through faith. Mr Sanders was General Director of the OMF, and had earlier been instrumental in the conversions of my sister Ai Lin and brother Jim. Was there a time when you felt inadequate for a certain change in your life? How did you overcome that? At every stage of my life -- personal, family, church, academia -- there have been times and transitions when I have felt a sense of inadequacy to some degree or another. However, just as St. Paul’s question, “Who is sufficient for these things?” was answered by “Our sufficiency is of God”
