Safehaven

Safehaven is a non-denominational group started by 10 gay Christians which had been gathering since 1997 for prayer, Bible study and fellowship. It was LGBT-affirmative and made up of people from different age groups, backgrounds and religious traditions.

Safehaven was formed because several founding members had been made to feel unwelcome or were rejected outright by mainstream churches on account of their homosexuality. As such, many LGBT Singaporeans in mainstream churches chose to remain closeted for fear of being blacklisted and ostracised.

A salient example of discrimination was witnessed when the New Creation Church (NCC) showed little grace in expelling one of its gay male members. With no place to worship, that particular individual later gathered a few gay friends and began meeting weekly in one of their homes located along Zion Road just opposite Great World City. When their number grew to 10 to 15 within two months via word of mouth, they moved their place of congregation to Utterly Art along South Bridge Road which they rented from the gallery's owner.

This was the start of the fledgeling support group in which gay Christians could find solace and which provided devotees an environment to work out any conflicts they may have had about being gay and Christian. Many key members of Safehaven and FCC also came from the Choices ministry of the Church of Our Savior (COOS) (Singapore's main ex-gay church). One of FCC's worship leaders joined the it after he was rejected by City Harvest Church's (CHC) worship team for being gay. In a blog entry entitled, “Homosexuality: a geographical angle” by a pastor from a mainstream church, FCC was denounced as a pro-gay space which had failed to uphold what he called “hetero-normativity” and instead only served to reinforce “deviant sexual identity”. Hence, Safehaven and FCC ironically owe much to NCC, CHC and COOS for their existence.

As attendance and confidence swelled, the group decided that it needed a larger place to worship and set up a full fledged church called the Free Community Church (FCC). The name was chosen because the acronym FREE stood for "First Realise Everyone is Equal". FCC was officially registered with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of Singapore (ACRA) as a private limited company in 1999. This was a strategic move which enabled the organisation to operate without any hassles from the Government since the congregation each Sunday was simply regarded as a private gathering.

FCC was also not affiliated with any other church although it strove to be accepted as a regular church. It wanted to avoid being labelled a gay church, preferring to be known as "an all-inclusive church" since it was open towards not only sexuality in its multifarious manifestations, but also to all religions and church denominations. Safehaven subsequently became one of its ministries.

=See also=
 * Free Community Church
 * Archive of talk, "Gay Law: Emancipation And Emasculation" by Lim Wee Kuan, 1 October 2002

=References=
 * Safehaven's website:.

=Acknowledgements=

This article was written by Roy Tan.