Not what I had been thinking

CPE IN THE PHILIPPINES

It was with considerable fear and scepticism that I left Vancouver with 23 other people on January 11 to go to the Philippines to work with Church Partnership Evangelism for 16 days. I told myself that the only thing I needed to do was to go door-to-door and invite people to an evening evangelistic service. Since I was a latecomer to the program and came from Manitoba, I had not attended the orientation meetings the other participants had attended.

After talking to participants on the plane, I began to realize that the program was different from what I had been thinking.

Our first week was spent in Baliuag, Bulacan, 2-to-6 hours of travel by bus (depending on the traffic) outside the city of Manila. On Tuesday afternoon, we met the pastors of the churches where we would work and some of the volunteers with whom we would walk. Three of us were assigned to the Jesus Christ Conservative Baptist Church in Baliuag.

On Wednesday morning at 9:00, Rachel and Arlene (two women from the church) and I walked to the first house on the street to which we had been assigned. "What am I doing here?" kept going through my mind. Rachel introduced me to the lady who came to the door of the house as her friend from Canada and asked if she would listen to my testimony and answer a few questions. Half an hour later, as the lady prayed with us and asked Jesus to be the centre of her life, I had the answer to my question. Again and again that scene was repeated in the next few days. The people with whom we worked were as amazed as we were, for several years previously they had done something similar and had had doors shut in their faces. Last year, they had tried a tent crusade, and again there had been very few responses.

On Friday and Saturday of that week, we began follow-up. Again my faith was strengthened as I saw that the people who had made decisions to make Christ a part of their lives had been reading the Bibles we had left them and had been working on the Bible lessons. One lady had invited three other ladies in her neighbourhood, who had also prayed, as well as three friends with whom they wanted to share the good news they had heard. For one-and-a-half hours, the seven ladies, Rachel and I sat in the shade of the trees and had a bilingual Bible study in Tagalog and English. The church is committed to follow-up, and all of the 108 people who prayed the prayer of repentance are being nurtured and encouraged in their walk.

The second week was spent in the city of Manila, a city of 17 million people. Where do you start? This time there were seven churches working with CPE, and four of us were assigned to the Banner of Praise Alliance Church in Sampoloc. What we had seen in Baliuag was repeated almost exactly in this church. In Manila, we found that we could use English more often and that we did not need to travel very far from the church.

Banner of Praise, a church of about 75 members, was left with more than 100 people to follow up. This church already had three areas of outreach among the squatters in Manila. One outreach was under a bridge and surrounding area where 20,000 people had built homes from whatever materials they could get. A second outreach was on an island in Manila Bay, and the third was among the relocated squatters from Smoky Mountain. However, the church, with its young, enthusiastic pastor, were not discouraged. When I expressed concern about the job of descipling more than 100 new believers, Edna, who had been walking door-to-door with me, simply said, "That is our job. We will do it!"

It was also encouraging to hear from a church where CPE had been working seven months previously. Of the 78 people who were on their follow-up list, 32 were now actively involved in the church and Bible study, and these 32 had brought another 18 with them, often relatives or friends. The church was very excited because 13 of these would be baptized the following Sunday. The other 46 on their list were not forgotten either; they were still being contacted and encouraged.

Were these "true conversions" that we saw? Were people's lives changed? Will they continue to grow spiritually? Nick Dyck, the co-leader of our CPE group, reminded us that we needed to keep records so that follow-up could take place (in the 16 days our team was in the Philippines, we recorded more than 2000 decisions) but that God kept the real books. Those people whose names were recorded in the Lamb's Book of Life are sisters and brothers with whom we will gather around the throne to sing praises to our Lord and Saviour.

Waldo Thiessen is a member of South Park MB Church in Altona, Man.

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