The Elijah Challenge in Full Gospel Church, Ipoh, Malaysia

14-18 July 2010

Timothy Lam’s mission trip to North Thailand

“Full Gospel Church in Ipoh is often mistaken to be another church – Full Gospel Assembly (FGA). This church is formerly known as the Church of Ipoh and has taken the new name after the English congregation separated itself from the Chinese congregation. After some years, it became a bilingual congregation and then it evolved further and finally today it has become a Cantonese-speaking congregation. The leader of Full Gospel Church is Elder Tai. He is assisted by a full-time minister, Pastor Christy Chang and also an itinerant preacher, Pastor Timothy Lam. Pastor Timothy was instrumental in inviting us to conduct The Elijah Challenge seminar in this church.

The first evening, the sanctuary was filled with some 25 participants. The second and final night of the training, the number had increased to more than 40 people. Many of them could only understand Chinese. Thus the training was done in Mandarin even the preferred language was Cantonese. The participants were not new to The Elijah Challenge as they had a taste of the healing experience back in April when we first conducted a healing service in their church. Their enthusiasm was most encouraging and it kept building up after every session.

The importance of going through a few nights of training cannot be emphasized enough. The reason is because we are not trying to give mere formulas but build the actual faith of all these ‘faceless and nameless’ ordinary believers. Faith can only be built when the believers receive the truth which is found in the Word of God. That is the reason why 90 percents of our training slides show scripture portions. After every session, we challenge all participants to exercise their faith in healing the infirm in the name of Jesus. It is always easy to teach theory but when it comes to actually using it, it gets a little tougher. When miracles happen, the faith of those who are practicing divine healing soars to a higher height.

At the end of the first session, ten participants needed healing in various parts of their bodies. The other participants laid hands on these people and healed many of them. The next evening, the participants had the same result – their fellow participants were healed of pain in various parts of their bodies. At the evangelistic healing rally on 17 July, 16 people accepted Jesus as their Saviour and made a definite commitment to follow Christ. Once again, during the healing session, the trained believers sprung into action and many people were healed or physically touched by God. All these miracles provided a strong proof to the unbelievers that Jesus is the only way to the Father.

Those who were healed stepped up to the stage and testified to the glory of God. Many were healed of the pain in the back and legs. A couple of them had their shoulders and arms healed. To prove the healing, many swung their arms and raised them high. Others squatted o climb up and down the stage to test their new-found mobility. The participants were laying hands and commanding without any fear or intimidation. Miracles happened and even those who did not receive complete healing, declared that their conditions were markedly improved. After each command, all the participants were told to ask the infirm people to identify their levels of improvement from the scale of 0 to 10. Zero being no pain at all to 10, which means intensive pain. By using that gauge, the trained disciples were able to evaluate the healing condition of the infirm person.

On Sunday, during the morning service, the trained believers had become very bold. They were healing people by themselves and they did that way passed the closing time. We thank God for a very fruitful time in Ipoh. We did not only impart the lessons on divine healing to the congregation of Full Gospel Church, we were also able to challenge this church to evangelize Ipoh for Christ.”

Reported by
Albert Kang
Coordinator
Elijah Challenge Asia