Calling all MBS (ED) alumni ...

The living legend of MBS Rev. Loh Soon Choy recently had a big birthday celebration.  (Let's leave the details of that to someone who went to blog on. I was not there or I would). At that celebration it seems that many MBS (Malaysia Bible Seminary) alumni attended and there was as expected much reminiscing about the good old days, as well as catching up on each other's lives.

And as usual (yup, it has happened many times before in the past) some brought up the need to revive the alumni association etc. The main problem of course is there is often more talk and many suggestions but few willing "workers". It would seem most of the alumni are far too busy and have a 101 reasons (dare I say excuses) for not being able to help, contribute etc. 

I could blog for pages on the frustrations of the small handful who over the years took on the challenge of trying to revive the alumni association only to be met most of the time with very pitifully lukewarm (if not downright cold) responses.  But I won't.... at least for now :-)

As has been the case over the last 10 years or so, the challenge to revive the alumni association was taken up by Patrick Cheng who (again!) approached me with some new ideas. One of them being starting an MBS alumni blog to at least try to connect alumni with each other. So far there are three of us involved in this project, Patrick, Looi Kok Kim and myself (Paul Long) Kok Kim has to be involved whether he likes it or not since he was the passionate one who hounded  Patrick to "do something!" 

Warning: If you back out on this project KK, I will make you eat tarantulas which I will personally bring back from Cambodia for you. :-) ... the same way I brought back live sago larvae for you to eat when you had to pull out of our mission trip to Sarawak when we were MBS students, (and left me as the sole guy with 4 girls on the team)! :-)

But first, I personally need to clarify a few matters.

1. There is no MBS (ED) alumni committee. We do not have the mandate to form a committee anymore as not enough alumni make an effort to attend alumni meetings, and most new graduates have this irritating habit of disappearing during alumni homecoming and bi-annual elections. We do not have the numbers and unless we change our constitution (we do have one!), that's ther way it will remain.

2. This blog is not an official alumni blog but an personal effort of 3 alumni to start reaching out and networking via the www.   (The title is "The Unofficial Malaysia Bible Seminary (ED).  All opinions are personal.

3. This blog idea is just a seed idea and we hope it would start some networking among alumni as this blog has the potential of overcoming one major group of excuses which are:  

a. We are too busy

b. Our schedules are too tight

c. We don't know each other

d. We live too far apart to get together 

e. Add in your own here ...

* Note that I now live and minister in New Zealand

How this blog develops is up to us. But for now, the ideas we three have come up with are:

1. Alumni who have something to share can send their posts / information to me (until someone else takes over). That way we get news of what we are all doing and we can share thoughts, joys, lessons learnt etc. Let's be creative - you could send links to your church websites or personal websites and we can link them up.

* Alumni, you would have gotten an e-mail from Patrick so you would know my e-mail address

2. We can interact with each other via posting comments on blogs.

* Question: why blogspot? why not _____ or _____ or use a forum or _____ etc.? 

* Answer: This is just a seed, a test run, and it is free, it is easy and right now we don't need bells and whistles ... Also, I am like most busy and I am a pastor not a web designer or computer science graduate so 

3. A blog site has the advantage of someone (*sigh* me ... unless we can get Rev. Loh SC to help. Now there's an idea!!!) filtering the content, and it is more personal. I personally am pretty fed up with fwded mail - chain letters.

God bless

Paul