The "Antioch of Asia" Before Billy Graham

When we hear Antioch of Asia, we always associate it with Billy Graham in 1978. That is the prophetic call of Singapore. But I have heard for some time that Singapore was called Antioch before that, during John Sung's visit to Singapore in the 1930s. I couldn't find the reference until recently.

It was not a term John Sung used in the 1930s. I found it somewhere else, among the John Sung material at Telok Ayer Chinese Methodist Church.

The room you have to ask for

Telok Ayer Chinese Methodist Church is the oldest Chinese Methodist church in Singapore. Benjamin West started it in 1889 in a rented shophouse on Upper Nanking Street, preaching to about thirty people in Malay while someone turned it into Hokkien. The building on Telok Ayer Street came much later. The foundation stone went down in January 1924, and Bishop Titus Lowe dedicated the sanctuary on 11 January 1925. It was gazetted a national monument in 1989.

The church opened a heritage gallery in September 2025. The John Sung material is not in the general gallery on the ground floor. You have to ask to see it.

Telok Ayer hosted Sung when he came in 1935, and his first visit that August ran to forty sermons in a fortnight. The pulpit he preached from is there. So are photographs and notes from those weeks. But the thing I had gone looking for was not in the photographs. It was on a printed page from fifteen years later.

1950

In 1950, the church marked twenty-five years since the rebuilding of the sanctuary and produced a commemorative volume. Churches, schools and institutions sent in congratulatory pieces, which were printed in the volume as calligraphy and verse. Two pages of those greetings carry the word.

The first is a four-character inscription in a ruled box, sent by a Chinese seminary. It reads The modern Antioch (現代安提阿).

The second is longer and is the one that matters. It is a hymn in four stanzas titled the church at Antioch (安提阿教會), set to be sung to a tune from 普天頌讚, the standard Chinese hymnal. The first three stanzas are straight out of Acts. Then the fourth turns and speaks to the room. It names the Methodist Church in Singapore (星洲衛理公會), and asks that it actually be today's Antioch (實作今日安提阿). Set free the truth, glorify God, save people, let the sound of praise shake the world.

That is 1950. Twenty-eight years before the National Stadium.

Who was writing, and when

The greetings came from China, and the timing is worth sitting with. One of the pieces on the same page is dated 9 May 1950 and was written in the pastor's study of a church in Haicheng county, Fujian. That is the last narrow window. Within months the China Inland Mission's own director had concluded the work there could not continue and ordered every missionary out. Within two years the mission had moved its entire headquarters to Singapore.

So this is a Chinese church, in the year the door shut behind it, writing to a Chinese congregation in Singapore, and telling it what it is now for.

It was not a one-off flourish either. In November 1951, eighteen months later, Quek Keng Hoon of the Chinese Inter-Church Union here wrote to two China Inland Mission men surveying Malaya. His argument was that the door in China had closed and the overseas Chinese had opened theirs, and was that not an indication of what God wanted. Bring your workers here, he said, to Malaya, "of which Singapore is the center." The mission voted that year to move.

The same idea, in the same few years, from both sides of the water.

What it means to be Antioch

The men who wrote that hymn were not being vague. Their first three stanzas walk through what Acts actually says about the place, and it is worth following them, because the picture is smaller and stranger than the way the phrase gets used now.

Antioch began as a refugee church. The believers who started it had been scattered by the persecution that followed Stephen's death, and they arrived in the city as people who had lost somewhere else (Acts 11:19-21). Nobody planted it on purpose. Some of them, against the custom of the time, spoke to Greeks as well as Jews, and it took.

Jerusalem was not sure what to make of it and sent Barnabas to have a look. What is recorded is that he saw the grace of God and was glad (Acts 11:23). He did not correct them or take charge. He went to Tarsus, found Saul, and the two of them taught there for a year. It was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26), and the name was given to them by outsiders. They did not choose it.

Then the church sent money. A famine was coming, and the believers there decided, each according to what he could manage, to send relief to the brothers in Judea (Acts 11:29). The first thing Antioch sent was not missionaries. It was help going back to the church that had come to check on it.

The sending of people came later, and it came out of worship. Prophets and teachers were fasting and praying when the Spirit said to set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work (Acts 13:2-3). They fasted again, laid hands on the two of them, and let them go. Antioch gave away its two best men and kept none of the credit.

That is the shape of the thing. A church of displaced people. Glad to be looked at. Not in charge. Sending money back to those who had less. Releasing its leaders to leave.

It is worth saying too that Antioch got things badly wrong in public, since it is where Paul opposed Peter to his face over who he would eat with (Galatians 2:11-14). And it did not stay the centre. Andrew Peh, who teaches mission at Trinity Theological College, has pointed out that Antioch was eclipsed in time by cities like Nisibis, Edessa and Alexandria, which became the sending places in their turn. He has said the title is a little self-aggrandising, and he is not wrong to say so.

Which is probably the honest reading of what those men in Fujian were asking for in 1950, in the year they lost everything. Not that Singapore would become important. That it would be the kind of church that hands things over and lets people go.

The page is still there. You just have to ask. It felt that the Chinese church has passed down a mantle to Singapore. And it was not the first time. It happened even before Sir Stamford Raffles arrived in Singapore, which we will cover in the next article.

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