The church was founded as the Hakka Community Church along Sophia Road sometime around 1949. In the late 1950s, it was renamed “Church of Christ of Malaya” following the completion of its building in 1959. The building is located along the entrance to Mount Sophia on Wilkie Road.
Mount Sophia is notable for several reasons. In the 19th century, it served as an important inner-city residential district for the middle and upper classes. Today, it is one of the rare remaining hills in the Central Area of Singapore.
Besides providing a venue for residences, Mount Sophia also accommodated a diverse range of educational and religious institutions, some of which still stand today. Other institutions denoted the religious groups which resided in or frequented the area, the more notable being the two modern-style churches — the Church of Christ of Malaya and the former Trinity College Chapel. Several Sikh institutions, built more recently, can also be found in the area such as the Sri Guru Singh Sabha Sikh Temple.
The church was designed in modern reinforced concrete construction. It featured high ceilings and fixed ventilators situated above and below the metal frame windows. For the Church of Christ of Malaya, vestiges of the art deco are distinguishable from the curved balcony ends and the many horizontal trimmings. One side of the entrance’s façade is vertically accentuated in the form of a tower-like projection, topped by a cross on its roof.
Interestingly, the church was, at one point in the late 1950s, known as the “Malayan Christian Church”. This is indicative of the scope of evangelisation which stretched to Malaya, as Singapore had not yet gained independence then.
In 1975, The Church instituted the “差传部” (pinyin: “chà chuán bù”), which translates to the “Mission Ministry”. This venture functioned as an educational and outreach division of the church.
This is a conserved building(s) by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), please visit URA’s Conservation Portal for more details.
Buildings and sites featured on Roots.SG are part of our efforts to raise awareness of our heritage; a listing on Roots.SG does not imply any form of preservation or conservation status, unless it is mentioned in the article. The information in this article is valid as of May 2019 and is not intended to be an exhaustive history of the site/building.
