Asia Journal ’24 - #11

 

The interviews and time spent with two well-known professionals was alone worth the trip to Asia. For breakfast we met with Juwita Suwito, a famous award-winning Malaysian musician who has been a

mentor on the Malaysian Idol show. Her work in contextualizing worship music is bearing fruit. We then travelled a couple hours north to meet with SooiLing Tan who is the dean of the AGST-Alliance. Her PhD is from Fuller Theological Seminary (my alma mater) and she also did a post-doctoral at its Brehm Centre. One of her specializations is in Ethno-musicology. She was extremely helpful in her insights into the present state of contextual worship and the future of the same. The 4-hour conversations with Leon Lim in the car were also stimulating. We discovered that we had both musical backgrounds and theological training in common.