Keeping Filipino farm families’ livelihoods from literally sliding down mountain slopes is part of a holistic ministry that Southern Baptist missionaries Jess and Wendy Jennings share enthusiasm for.
The Jenningses serve mountain farmers in the Agusan River Valley.
They began their International Mission Board work in the Butuan City area of the Philippines in 1994. This city sits in the northeastern corner of the southern island of Mindanao. It is near here in the Agusan River Valley where the farmers meet mountainous challenges to farming and consequently to their existence.
Jess Jennings explained that the Agusan River flows through Butuan City and beyond near the mountains, creating the Agusan River Valley.
“The areas of the valley we are targeting have about 45 villages and about 80,000 people. Ninety-eight percent of those people are farmers. Most are subsistence farmers with most farms partially on hillsides and covering three to four acres.
“As erosion occurs, you soon run out of land because all of your topsoil is gone.”
Because the erosion problems can literally wipe out a farmer’s small plot within a few years, the Jenningses are continually teaching a method of slope farming pioneered by Baptist missionary Harold Watson in the 1980s.
The Jenningses work originates from a 10-acre farm and demonstration center, funded by the World Hunger Fund of Southern Baptists (see story, page 4), where the Watson method, known as Sloping Agricultural Land Technology (SALT) is taught to Filipino farmers.
“It’s a system to stop soil erosion, and it is a complete system of farming that is awesome,” Jennings said.
SALTing the earth
The SALT method includes planting nitrogen-fixing plants in tight rows. The roots and rather large size of the plants help prevent erosion. A secondary use of these plants is that they can be trimmed and the trimmings fed to the farmers’ livestock.
Jennings said farmers in this region primarily grow corn, bananas and other fruits, but after they implement the SALT method they can grow almost anything.
“We serve in the rural areas around the city, working with the mountain farmers. You would probably label our ministry a ‘holistic ministry.’ We do a lot of agricultural training, community development and water-well drilling,” he said.
A farmer’s annual income is about $800, while a schoolteacher would make about $3,000 a year.
A small percentage of Filipinos are wealthy, and teachers would be considered a growing middle class with some owning motorcycles as primary transportation.
Leading the Filipinos to salvation in Jesus Christ and into discipleship was a sparse proposition back in 1994.
“When we arrived in August 1994, Southern Baptists had one church in the city. The total evangelical population within the city was about 5 percent of the city’s total population. We chose the river valley because in 1994, of the 80,000 people, about 1 percent were evangelical,” Jess Jennings said.
“The Philippines is a democracy. It’s not a closed country where holistic work is all you can do. We do very aggressive evangelism door to door, and we show the ‘Jesus’ film to thousands of people all over the valley,” he said.
“They’re open to that. Our strategy is to do a ‘filtering event’ such as showing a film or conducting a medical clinic.
“Volunteers from the United States have been a tremendous part of our ministry in this. From the filtering events, we begin home Bible studies and later begin churches from those.”
Through Baptist missions efforts in the valley, 22 Baptist churches exist there today and an association of them has been organized as the Agusan River Valley Association.
Wendy Jennings’ responsibilities in ministry include ministering to children of the farmers, and to her and Jess’ own children as she home schools 11-year-old David, 8-year-old Krysten and 2-year-old Betsy.
She also coordinates a network of home-schooled children and their families, many of them fellow missionaries. “The mission board is very supportive in providing for our educational needs,” she said.
“I help plan meetings, events and coordinate basic skills testing on a yearly basis to determine progress and to see if there are any special needs,” she said.
Schools in the Philippines vary from the poorest to the wealthiest. In cities the private schools are the best, but school quality and funding is downhill from there.
“In the rural areas the teacher-to-student ratio is 1 to 60 and goes as high as 1 to 80. In some places where access is only by hiking, schools are much like in the pioneer days of America with one teacher teaching four grade levels in one classroom,” she said.
“There is just no funding for public schools; it’s just pitiful,” Jess Jennings said. “Normally, the really good private schools are run by the Chinese. They’re the wealthy business people in the Philippines. In almost every city these schools are the best funded and some of these schools are evangelical, but some are not or have no religious affiliation,” he said.
Because the Jenningses are involved in starting new churches, it is hard for them to worship at the same church every Sunday. Leading and worshiping in various churches necessitated by their roles in church planting does a have a commonality — the language.
“Even though I do know the language — Cebuano — it‘s been just in the past year or so that I’ve felt like I’ve really been able to worship in the language in church services,” Wendy Jennings said.
Along with their own work, the Jenningses also work with missions volunteers.
“We’ve had a partnership with the DeKalb Baptist Association the last four years,” Jess Jennings said.
The main need they met was helping with five medical clinics to do checkups and so forth.
Every one of those was in areas where a Bible study had just begun or we wanted to start a church. In those five clinics we were able to minister in 17 different villages, seeing more than 7,000 patients. Some volunteers are nurses and physicians; one is Mike Story, a pediatrician in Fort Payne.”
Building efforts
Besides medical volunteers, a need for construction volunteers is burgeoning, as plans are made to build a church camp for retreats and other special meetings.
The current problem is that the only existing camp is eight to nine hours away — too far and expensive for any of the valley’s people to attend. They hope to begin construction work a little at a time in June 2004.
“The summer of 2001 we had 25 mostly college students in the Agusan River Valley area.
“In eight weeks we were able to present the gospel face to face with more than 20,000 people, and I know at least four churches came out of that,” Jennings said.
The dangers that missionaries in the Philippines have met in the last year or so do not dissuade the Jenningses from their ministry there.
“I try to put it in perspective. When our Filipino friends found out that we were going to America on furlough, they would sincerely say to us, ‘Be careful — it sounds pretty dangerous over there,’” Jess Jennings said.
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