The Gift Goes On

By Pastor Latt

First Burmese Baptist Church of San Francisco celebrated annual Christmas Candlelight Worship service on Christmas Day, December 25th. God has blessed us with His blessing of guidance throughout the ceremony. Members of our church, friends and visitors around San Francisco Bay Area were gathered together to celebrate a joyful Christmas for this year. Candlelight Christmas is one of a blessed tradition of our church and it has been blessed to many people for many years.

Children and Junior Fellowship gathered at 3 pm for their Christmas activities led by Sunday School teachers. Everyone was filled with joy and fun for their favorite exchanged gifts from their friends. Smiles, laughter, praising, and joyful voices of kids have filled the halls to give us significances of the birth of Jesus Christ. Truly, the Baby Jesus has blessed us with His love, peace, and joy to the hearts of everyone.


Christmas dinner was like “Agape Feast” with full of delicious food, soup, desserts, sweets, drinks, and traditional delicacies. Christmas means Christ + mass, “a mass gathering around the baby Jesus.” I have that sense of feeling when people enjoying dinner at our fellowship hall as one large family. We need larger dinning room in future. May God bless to food committee members and generous donors for this special dinner. As usual, many families got opportunity to take family portraits by our photographer, Richard Khoo and James Wong.

Our grand celebration of Candlelight Christmas took three hours with varieties of items to worship our new born King, Jesus Christ. Each and every items including, Christmas carols, Children’s songs, praise dances, Musical Nativity, solos, instrumental, ethnic Karen and Kachin group songs, Young Adult songs, men’s quartet, adult choir, and telling Christmas stories have provided rich blessings of Christmas to our worshippers. Pastor Latt has delivered challenging message, “The Wonders of Christmas” to make worshippers to give individual responses to Jesus.

The climax of the service was a non-stop twenty five minutes powerful praising of thirty five FBBC Choir members under the title of “The Gift Goes On Medley.” I felt the power of the Holy Spirit when they praising God with these choirs. They were like multitude of angels of the Lord bringing good news of great joy to the audience. Thanks to Musicians and directors Johnson Paw and Naw Bawk Lazum. Under the dimming light, the invitation of Pastor, the soft and tender singing of “Room in My Heart,” sharing of Christmas light among the worshippers by choir members, a dedication prayer, and a vigorous shouting of everyone “Go Tell It On The Mountain” make this year Christmas a joyous and meaningful one. Praise be to the Lord, Hallelujah!

Videos and photos will be available soon from our AV crews. Thanks to Ko Peter Lau for providing me some photos.