The Church of Christ could have begun in Malaysia (then Malaya) as early as in 1955 when the late Ira Y. Rice came to Singapore as a Dale Carnegie course instructor. In the period of his four and a half year stay in Singapore, he travelled often into Malaya and consequently converted one Lye Hong Meng, a Methodist preacher in Muar, Johore, and several others and thus established the first Church of Christ in the country. In the same period, Rice, too, converted one Chew Seng Teck, a Presbyterian preacher in Kluang, Johore. Subsequently, others in the Presbyterian church were converted too. In April 1961, Rice and his wife, Vada, moved up to Kuala Lumpur and established a church there too. This was at 123-D, Ipoh Road. Soon after, they were joined in the field by Frank H. and Joan Pierce in July of the same year. The Pierces helped with the work in Kuala Lumpur until about February 1965 when they went down to Seremban to begin a new church there. However, they left shortly in May to return to the States. Prior to this, they were travelling up to Penang from about 1963 every once a month or two to meet the spiritual needs of a policeman who was baptized in Kuala Lumpur and who was then transferred to the island.
In April of 1965, Jud and Pancy Whitefield and Philip and Kay Wright arrived in Seremban. They were followed by Richard and Winima Matlock in June. The Whitefields later moved up to Kuala Lumpur to work with the church there. A year or two later, the Wrights and, later, the Matlocks returned to the States. Following them into Seremban were Ken and Estelle Sinclair who came in 1967. They stayed through to September 1971 when they returned to the States. They came back to Seremban in January 1973 and remained until 1977 when a government ruling which forbade foreign missionaries from working in the country forced them to leave. They were the last of the missionaries in the church to leave. In their second stay of mission work in Seremban, they also planted a church in Port Dickson which became the focus of their work towards the last few years of their stay in the country.
Meanwhile in the same period of between the mid-sixties to the early seventies, other missionaries were coming in to other parts of the country to either establish a new work, revive, or assist in a work which was already begun.
Hayden O. Jenks (1965-69), Anna K. Davis (1967-71), Miles Cotham (1969-70) all worked in Penang. Frank and Joan Pierce returned to the island in March 1971 and began a new work at 1 Kennedy Road. They left in April 1975. By then the two congregations had merged to meet at 60-T Jalan Matang Kuching in Ayer Itam.
Dennis Cady came to Kuala Lumpur in 1966. In 1967 he was travelling to and from Port Swettenham (now Port Klang) in Klang to teach and preach to a small group there on Sunday afternoons. He left in 1968. Others who worked in Kuala Lumpur were Thelma Eubanks (1966-72), Jayleta Glaze (now Heflin) (1968-69), Ron and Judy Warpole (1972-3), and Ken and Clyde Ann Willis (1972) who were earlier in Malacca in 1971.
Don and Ann Green arrived in Ipoh in 1966 and established a church there. They continued with this work through to 1969. The church in Ipoh was quite extraordinary in that it produced a number of men who went to Four Seas (Bible & Missions) College in Singapore and on their graduation returned to Malaysia to preach for some of the churches. Seremban was another church which shared this phenomenon, though on a smaller scale. Eddy Ee from Singapore preached in Seremban from 1971 to 1973 when the Sinclairs were back in the States on furlough.
The Whitefields who were then with the Kuala Lumpur congregation helped to restart the church in Klang in 1970. In 1972, the Bishops, Charles and Cloyce, came to Klang. They stayed through to 1975. In 1987, the Dearmans, Jim and Janis, set up the Malaysia School of Preaching in this town. They stayed for about eighteen months.
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