Why I Hunt?

Caspar David Friedrich's 'Wanderer above the sea of fog' - Something near to my heart

Most of the people will ask the following:

Why I am doing this?

I noticed that there is a lot of food guides, travel guides, even shopping guides but there is never a comprehensive guide or directory about the churches in Malaysia. Malaysia has a lot of different church denominations, and each of them has their own website/directory instead a collective website. So I decided to do one.

I been travelling quite a lot & far since I finished my secondary education & living away from my home town. The furthest place I went is was like 6 hours drive from my home town previously. 


Because I am not going to be a good food blogger..

Most people tend to hunt for good food at new places to try,sample out and start to write their eating experiences in a blog, etc. Hence the term 'foodhunter'. I am not a very picky person when it comes to food and don't really can differentiate the finer savoury differences being cooked in popular eating place versus the normal ones. Sometimes, the famous food spots are being over-hyped and the level of service is very lousy as the food proprietors becomes arrogant and rude towards customers due to their business success. As long as the food is not so bad and is warm, (I don't like cold main meals) I can accept it into my stomach :D  Furthermore, I have a strong tendency to stick to my favourite food regardless of who the cook is.(of course home cooked meals are the best) So, being a food critic is not for me.

Where is my Church?


More than a decade ago, there is not such thing as inexpensive & reliable GPS navigators devices, smartphones, google maps or even fast Internet connections. What you have is only the yellow pages and it is hard to find local nearby churches in a foreign area. This problem happened to me during my university days. Luckily, the first foreign place I landed upon was a small sleepy town. I wandered around by foot (I don't have my own transportation then) to find my local church so that I can attend the weekly Sunday services in the new place. I was literally hunting down searching for the church and trying very hard to remember the whole route to reach it. I remembered that I don't even had a map on hand,that I just had the address of the church. So, I was going around and asking the local people that I met during my search for the directions. I finally found the church that I was looking for after much wandering around, doing u-turns, going in the wrong direction (getting lost).I became exhausted in the process and a hard time remembering the entire route (from the bus station to the church. And not mentioning the route to get back to the bus station so I can go back to my hostel... LOL). 

Attempting to join the church services? - But, don't know the service schedule...


This is the most commonly heard response, particularly if a person is living in a new place due to study, work, etc. Church websites may not be updated on a constant basis, some old website were not taken down or even multiple websites  of the same church may exist at the same time. I cannot really guarantee the correctness of the service times because I am just doing a Google search or even taking a picture of the signboard, but it should be a good rough estimation. Some churches have very early morning services or very late evening services. Some even have daily services thus, it is entirely up to you to choose which slot to attend. 

Strange but true, over the last decade away from my home town, every place I went is in the process of collecting funds to build a new church building


I had stayed at 3 different states in Malaysia over the years, attended the local congregation and there is a strange but a good coincidence that there is need to expand the church to cater to the growing Christian population whenever I went. It is a good sign that the evangelism efforts is bearing abundant fruits. But, I only managed to stay  long enough to see through the completion of only 1 church building. That would also mean that there is a lot of new churches to be 'hunted' to be put into the TheChurchHunter website! (maybe I will have the chance to go to see the other 2 new buildings)

How does the interior of a Church look like?

Have you ever wondered how the interior of a church looked like? Well I am. Especially churches that have a very unique architecture or is a remnant of the British colonial rule. Some churches are a more than a century old, still well preserved and in active use by the congregation. Most people do not explore the churches that belong outside of their church denominations, hence the missing the chance to see how the church looked inside and how the service is celebrated. The way/flow the service is celebrated can be different between denominations. Even within the same denominations, it can be very different depending on the region or country. Differences aside, we are all believer of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. For the record, this blog's objective is not about showing the differences between the denominations. Personally, for me, there is nothing wrong in attending the services at other denominations. I attended a few where I try to keep a low profile among the congregation in case I did something out of place during the service. (dyeing my hair blond hair at one point don't really reflect the theme of keeping a low profile in a congregation where everyone seem to be more conservative in their hairstyle)

What defines a Church?


What is the church? Is the church a building? Is it the place where believers gather to worship? Or is the church the people—the believers who follow Christ? How we understand and perceive the church is quite important in determining how we live out our faith.A church is not just a physical building, it is a place where believers come together to celebrate the promise of Christ salvation to his people. So regardless of whether the church building is a cathedral or is part of a shoplot, or a chapel, I will try to capture and highlight it in this website.


Each post will be divided into 5 sections: 


A) General information
Address of the church & contact number. I want to avoid putting the email address of the church in question to avoid spam. 


B) Exterior
Photos showing the exterior of the church. 

C) Interior

Photos showing the interior of the church. 



D) Service Schedule
If available, photos showing the sign post for the service schedules. The other alternative will be the information harvested from googling the world wide web , together with the website link.


E) Surrounding
This is to help people to find the church itself by showing the photos of the surroundings. (usually a 360 view search of the surroundings, trying to identify any major/unusual landmarks nearby) Solely using GPS is not 100% accurate. And unfortunately, Google's powerful street-view feature is not available in Malaysia. Furthermore, some of the churches don't have accurate address to be pinpointed exactly into the Google map.


Help Needed: 



1) If you find the information in the posts to be inaccurate or incomplete (note the remark in the post - To Be Updated. It is due to my failure to Google it), do drop me a message in the comments section of the post so that I can correct it and update it in the posts.


2) If you wish to submit your church into the blog, feel free to contact me.  However, you need to send me the photos/info as per the 5 sections mentioned above. This is to maintain standardization of each posts. If not, then you just have to wait until my hunting area reached your church. 



Sincerely,


TheChurchHunter