Evelyn Riviera has a question for the five American university students gathered around her front door.
“Is it true that Americans don’t eat rice?” she asks. “They just eat bread?”
Her visitors laugh. Sitting on wooden benches under her thatch awning, they make small talk, chatting about American culture and Filipino food. In the course of conversation, the University of Mobile students tell Riviera a story about Christ healing a cripple. She’s never heard it.
The volunteer missions team’s approach to sharing its faith is simple. It doesn’t hold Vacation Bible Schools or medical clinics. It doesn’t attract crowds with music or spectacles. Instead it arrives in a village and asks to stay for several days, building relationships and hanging out.
The team members live as the people they came to minister to live. They sleep in hammocks, take bucket baths and wash their clothes in pans of water. Whenever they travel from village to village, they huddle in boats and ride the Oras River. They visit people who live so deep in the jungle that no roads reach their homes.
This method of witnessing allows villagers to open their homes with true Filipino generosity.
In the first village the team members visit, they stay in a family’s home. They chat with the parents, play with the children and become part of the community. Team leader Megan Hunter of First Baptist Church, Fairview, said she cherishes the time hanging out with several Filipinos outside their home. They relax and laugh and talk about Jesus.
“It was a lot of fun to study the Word of God with them, to hear their questions, to see it kind of start to click with them,” she said. “But most of all, (I loved) just the community that we had there with those people — all crowded in that one little room around a light bulb. We didn’t have a TV. We didn’t have games. We didn’t have any of that. We had each other and the Word of God.”
As the team members travel from village to village, they find most people will listen to stories from the Bible. However, the villagers rarely comprehend the gospel message.
Most of the country’s population adheres to a mix of Catholicism and animism. In many of the homes the team visits, there are calendars depicting Mary and Jesus and shrines containing idols of the Santo Nino, or Christ as a child. In the Filipino belief system, people earn heaven. They believe they must compensate for their sin by giving to the poor or helping those in need. They can’t easily grasp the idea that God would give anyone salvation as a gift.
After visiting Riviera, the team encounters direct conflict with the area’s traditional belief. In the cinderblock home of another villager, Adam Morris of Bayside Baptist Church, Harrison, Tenn., explains salvation. The student tells a man that one must ask forgiveness from and dedicate his or her life to Jesus Christ to receive salvation.
“Because Jesus is God and because He is perfect, He is able to forgive sins,” Morris said. “Does all that make sense, or do you have any questions about it?”
The man does have a question.
“If I ever want to go to heaven, what do I need to do?” he asks.
Morris repeats that the man simply needs to ask for forgiveness, but the villager wants a more involved answer. He said he always prays.
He is always nice to his neighbor. What more can he do?
Samantha Parrott of The People of Mars Hill, Mobile, said most of their listeners ask the same question: What can they do to get into heaven?
Nicole Hill, of Chunchula, said she feels resigned and learned to relinquish control to God.
They shared the gospel. Now God will do the rest.
“We could tell them all day long what we believe, but God is the one who will help change their perspective,” she said. “I trust … that He’s going to do that.”
Although few seem to understand the message, the students see signs of hunger for the gospel in their listeners. Jacob Fowler of Capshaw Baptist Church shared a Bible story with a man who immediately asked to hear another one. Morris added after one Bible study, a woman said she had never heard such a message in all of her 60 years.
From conversations with these people, it seems to Morris that they simply feel honored the team traveled so far to share a spiritual message.
“The fact that we cared enough to come all the way around the world to share this message with them that we believed so strongly in — that in itself spoke to them,” he said.
“Through that, we got to share the gospel with them.” (BP)
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