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| Filipino Insider Missions in the Buddhist World |
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| David S. Lim |
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What constitutes Filipino mis-sions to reach the one bil-lion Buddhists in the world today? This article will show that tentmakers (Christians who evangelize and make disciples cross-culturally) are most effective in doing frontier mis-sions, especially if they are trained in catalyzing "insider move-ments" (IM) on indigenous princi-ples of self-governing, self-support, self-propagation and self-theologizing groups of believers.
Though there are no concrete data yet on how many Filipino Evangelical missionaries are in the Buddhist world, I estimate (conservatively) there may be about 2,500 of them, mostly tentmakers. Perhaps about 500 of them went forth with intentions to be church-supported "career missionaries" in Buddhist lands, but almost all of them soon discovered that finding employment (almost always in cit-ies) in their target country is the only way they can stay long-term.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT: FILIPINO MIGRATION
In the last three and a half dec-ades, there has been a massive movement of Filipinos into almost 200 countries of the world. The causes are economic and demo-graphic: the weak economy with high rates of unemployment and rapid population increase,[1] to-gether with an inward looking in-dustrialization policy. Thus, the economy has become more and more dependent on the remittance of these overseas contract workers (OCW) as a valuable source of for-eign exchange currencies.[2]
Though it started mainly as "muscle drain" to work in oil fields in mid-1970s, by 2004, thirty-five percent were "professional and technical work-ers" (engineers, pilots, physicians and nurses), which constitutes a large-scale "brain drain." (Wehrfritz and Vitug 2004:32). The main problem is low pay at home: For example, in 2002, nurses were paid $139/month in the country, but $650/month in Singapore, $982/month in Saudi Arabia, and $1,666/month in United Kingdom (:32-33). All the while, the Philip-pine economy earned $58.5 billion from 1990-2002, for an average of $4.5 billion/year from their remit-tances. In 2003, they brought in $7.2 billion or 20.6 percent of the country‘s export earnings or 6.2 per-cent of Gross National Product (GNP) (Baldoz 2004:47).
Another good reason why Filipinos can keep on flowing abroad is their good reputation, especially in "people skills." They have been appreciated for their technical skills, adaptability, creativity and cheerful-ness, their high level of productivity and quality in production and management, as well as their English proficiency and pleasant voice and disposition (Baldoz 2004:43-48). The flow of land-based and sea-based overseas Filipino contract workers con-tinue unabated, and their remittances continue to prop up the Philippine economy to this day (2010).
The top eight (8) countries of destination in 2003 were (in numerical order): Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Japan, UAE, Taiwan, Kuwait, Singapore, and Qatar (that‘s 50% in the Buddhist-majority nations!). These continue to be the dominant recipient nations to this today.
Though they contribute much to the Philippine economy through their remittances and donations, as well as gaining skills, know-how and capital for the country, almost eighty percent of them suffer from the social costs of marital break-ups and juvenile delinquency, with hardly any help from government and society at large (Wehrfritz and Vitug 2004:33; and Remigio 2004:22). The percentage of women has increased persistently: twelve percent in 1975, forty-seven percent in 1985, sixty-one percent in 1998, seventy percent in 2000, and seventy-three percent in for the social and moral fiber of Philippine society which has traditionally been quite matriarchal.
PHILIPPINE RELIGIOUS PROFILE
The Philippines is the one major Asian nation with a Chris-tian majority: eighty-four percent Roman Catholic, eight per-cent Protestant (including Aglipayans or Filipino/Independent Catholics), three percent Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC), three percent Muslim, and two percent others. Evangelicals (a subset of Protestants) are about seven percent, about six million in an estimated population of ninety-two million. The most visible Evangelical group, with perhaps the most diasporal churches, the Jesus is Lord Church (JIL), whose influence extends far beyond its membership, has 500,000 members, 0.3 percent of the population.[3]
The first Protestant missionaries arrived with the American occupation forces in 1898. The churches they planted eventu-ally became the mainline Protestant churches that constituted the National Council of Churches of the Philippines (NCCP) in 1965. In that same year, the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) was formed by the churches that were estab-lished through Christian and Missionary Alliance (entered 1928) and many post-World War II Evangelical missionaries, many of whom were re-assigned to the Philippines when China turned Communist in 1949. With the charismatic re-vival of the late 1970s and the 1980s, the leading Full Gospel church called Jesus is Lord (JIL) gathered the others together to form the Philippines for Jesus Movement (PJM). DAWN 2001 Survey reports that Protestant churches are categorized thus: PCEC =28%, NCCP = 13%, Baptist = 16%, Independent = 19%, and Full Gospel = 24%. The same survey shows there were 5.5 million Protestants who make up 7.2% of the popula-tion (2001: 35).
FILIPINO MISSIONS
The main coordinating body for Filipino tentmaker mis-sions is the "Philippine Missions Mobilization Movement (PM3)," which was formally formed in March 17-19, 2005 at a Mission Consultation with about forty church and mission leaders coming together for a historic strategic planning work-shop. Its mission statement states, "As a global movement of the Filipino church and partners, we shall seek to mobilize, train and send 200,000 tentmakers and career missionaries to reach the unreached people groups for Christ by 2010." The Philippine Missions Association (PMA, founded in 1983) through its new National Director, Bob Lopez,[4] volunteered to serve as its secretariat.
As of October 10, 2006, the last "Status of Philippine Mis-sions" Research Report covered 1,900 missionaries in seventy countries, with 1,055 working overseas and 143 not indicating the nations they are working in. 338 are listed as "career mis-sionaries," only sixty-five as tentmakers and nine as short-termers (both very under-counted!), and 117 as missionary mobilizers and trainers. It has also found 360 mission agencies, seventy-two missionary-sending churches, 188 Global Filipino churches, and nineteen OFW pastors. Most of Filipino mission leaders believe that these statistics cover only less than twenty
percent of the actual situation, but these can serve as a reliable data-base and sample for this article.
So far, the top twenty countries of documented Filipino missionaries are (Buddhist nations in italics): China (159), Thailand (126), USA (106), Cambodia (81), Indonesia (67), Malaysia (39), Japan (24), Singapore (24), Vietnam (20), Af-ghanistan (15), Canada (15), Austria (14), Bangladesh (14), Nepal (11), Hongkong (11), Kuwait (10), United Kingdom (10), Mongolia (9), UAE (8), and India (7).
These are joined and often supported by perhaps 50,000 Christian Filipinos overseas contract workers (OCWs) who are members in the various Diaspora Filipino Evangelical congre-gations (and international fellowships) in the major cities in the world. They are part of the global labor-export industry of the Philippines, which consists mainly of medical profession-als (like nurses, doctors, medical technologists, physical thera-pists, etc.), various professionals (executives, engineers, teach-ers, etc.), skilled workers (entertainers, seamen, care-givers) and domestic helpers. This article considers only 2,500 from among them as tentmaker-missionaries in the Buddhist world, as those who have actually made conscious cross-cultural ef-forts to reach their Buddhist hosts, neighbors and/ or col-leagues for Christ .
The concept of tentmakers is new for most church leaders, so PM3 has to exert much effort to inform and persuade them to work towards mobilizing their members to go as OCWs and serve as "lay missionaries" in their host countries. Almost every church would have members who have relatives or friends working overseas. And given the poverty and unem-ployment situation in the Philippines, tentmaking is almost the only option for the local churches to play any significant role in world missions. According to a PCEC survey (2003), about 80% of the pastors in Luzon received less than $20 per month from their churches![5]
MISSION STRATEGY: INTEGRATION OF FOUR STREAMS
The Philippine mission movement has benefited from the integration of three main strategies, represented by four theo-logical streams: Evangelical, Charismatic/Full Gospel, Trans-formational, and Diasporal.
Evangelical. The first stream is the mainline Evangelical groups who have traditionally used the Western Evangelical model of "evangelism and church-planting" in mission. They (and many still use the fundamentalist and pietistic lingo of "saving souls") constitute the majority of the membership of Philippine Mission Association (PMA), which includes the mission committees of local churches and denominations, as well as all kinds of mission groups: indigenous missions, for-eign missions (especially American and Korean), missionary training institutes, and campus/youth ministries.
Among the mission agencies, the most prominent in the 1990s was the Philippine Home Council (PHC) of Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), which was formed in 1966. By 1988, they had twelve missionaries serving in Japan, Thai land, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia (Pate 1989:221), and 50 by 2001 (Manzano 2001:31). Together with two other west-based agencies, SEND International and World Team (formerly Regions Beyond Missionary Union, RBMU) and their partner church, the Alliance of Bible Christian Communi-ties of the Philippines (ABCCOP), they formed Global Alli-ance Philippines Ministries (GAP) in order to field interna-tional missionary teams (Smith et al 2000:753).
PMA member churches with significant members of (partially) supported overseas missionaries are: Diliman Bible Church, Faith Baptist Church, Greenhills Christian Fellowship and Shekinah Christian Church. PMA also benefits from the presence of the major Western agencies, which often have their base for Asian or Asia-Pacific operations in Metro-Manila. The regular fellowship and interaction among these leaders have enhanced the healthy cross-fertilization of ideas and strategies as well as effected partnerships in the sharing of personnel and resources. Almost all of these missions operate with the typical evangelical paradigm of doing "evangelism and church-planting," and in recent years moved towards "church multiplication movements" (CMM), which is an ap-proach slightly different from that used by the next stream.
Charismatic/FullGospel.
The second stream, which has been growing the fastest, may be labeled "Charismatic/Full Gos-pel."[6] It has a similar church-planting emphasis but has a differ-ent strategic approach: they not only emphasize power evangelism through healing and deliverance ministries, they also adopt a more short-term approach to empowering local believers for ministry, thereby effecting a more "insider approach" to church multiplication.
The most prominent organiza-tions in this stream are Tribes and Nations Outreach (TNO) and Asian Center for Missions (ACM). TNO was founded in 1985 by Brother Joseph, after he left Open Doors with whom he orchestrated the "smuggling" of one million Bibles at one time into China (Zaide 1998:32). He developed a CMM strategy that became a thirteen-session training manual in their School of Workers (SOW) program. This has been implemented successfully in Mindanao, Indonesia, Myanmar and Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and recently in Laos). In recent years they have developed an Asia Strike Force program to bring relief and the gospel to disaster-hit areas, as well as agricultural development programs to help make barren plants productive through or-ganic farming methods.
Some of TNO‘s related ministries have developed "Project END," to "Empower Nationals for Disciple-making," by send-ing church leaders in short-term mission teams to train local church leaders in their effective ministries for contextual in-
sider approach in their own milieu (Lim 2003a:205). For in-stance, Torch Ministry was organized to evangelize Myanmar. It has raised funds to support some Burmese partners in their ministries. Its most successful venture has been in medical missions, led by its Executive Director, Kara Dimacali, a den-tist, who rejoiced to see the Burmese forming their own medi-cal teams and resourcing medicine and funds from their local sources in 2005. Similarly working from its three bases in Thailand, Ethnos-Asia led by Sonny Largado has been mobi-lizing Filipino and other Christians to do both short-term and long-term missions in the South-East Asian region, China, Myanmar and Nepal.
The other major group is ACM, which has become the training ground of those who have determined to go into career missions from the Charismatic stream, including not a few from the Evangelical stream.[7] ACM has trained over 1,100 missionaries with over 600 deployed to over 40 countries since 1995. These missionaries have undergone a five-month practical training at almost no cost to the trainee if they make a clear commitment to serve as career missionaries. But the scheme of fully supported workers did not work out well, for most churches just could not follow through on the pledged support for their missionaries and the expected church resources could not cover the budget. Thus most of their graduates became tentmakers and some of ACM‘s training centers were phased out. With the appointment of a new National Director recently, their new thrust will be to focus on tentmaker training
Transformational.
The third stream may be labeled "transformational," which has em-phasized contextualization (culture-sensitivity) and community develop-ment approaches in missions. Using the Lausanne Covenant as their theo-logical basis, these "radical Evangeli-cals" have advocated for the integrity and quality of mission. In many ways, they have served as the thinkers and friendly critics of the Evangelical and Charismatic mission movements, and since 1998, as co-leaders of Evangelicalism (including its cross-cultural missions) in the country.
The beginnings of the transformational stream may be traced to the third IVCF-Phil. triennial missions conference in December 1970, which tackled national and social issues. It was held amidst the brewing activism in the college campuses nationwide which culminated in the declaration of Martial Law in September 1972. Out of the desire to stir the church out of its conservative stance of acquiescent submission to authoritarianism and to highlight contextualization issues, Melba Maggay, an IVCF staff, set up the Institution for Stud-ies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC) in 1978. In the same year, the Asian Theological Seminary (ATS) started to offer "Church and Culture" as a required course in its Master of Divinity (M.Div.) program, perhaps the first among Evan-gelical seminaries. Soon, the PCEC General Secretary Jun Vencer, using the resources of World Vision, tried to train Bible school faculty for the introduction of "Community De-velopment" as a required course in evangelical Bible schools nationwide. Sadly this important attempt lasted for only two years.
The ‗80s saw the birth of several indigenous Christian de-velopment organizations (CDOs), esp. Mission Ministries Philippines (MMP, 1983), Penuel School of Theology (1986), and most prominently the Center for Community Transforma-tion (CCT, 1992). The latter has grown to be one of the most successful CDOs in the nation, enhancing the lives of more than 250,000 families in over a hundred urban poor communi-ties, including Muslim ones, nationwide.
Two networks of CDOs have been formed since: the main Evangelical one called Alliance of Christian Development Agencies (ACDA, 1995), and the Ecumenical one that works in partnership with Roman Catholics called the National Coali-tion for Urban Transformation (NCUT, 1996). Besides holding Consultations on Urban Ministries, the latter has been promot-ing indigenous models of Transformational Development (TD) for ministries in the cities, as they also contribute to the global urban ministry networks of Ray Bakke (International Urban Associates) and Viv Grigg (Servants Among the Urban Poor).
Then in late 1999, a training consortium called Asian School for Development and Cross-Cultural Studies (ASDECS) was formed. It became the first major official link of PMA and some key leaders of PM3 (like OMF and Grace Communion International) to the transformational stream. It also brought the missions department of the major evangelical seminaries[8] together to offer four Masters programs (in Community Development, Development Management, Transformational Leadership and Business Administration) for their students. It started to hold extension programs in 2004 in Cambodia and Laos to empower church leaders and missionaries in those countries in doing transformational missions (TM, actually IM) in their contexts. It is looking for local partners to host its extension centers in each Asian nation to equip nationals for TM or IM locally and globally.
All these three streams are represented in the leadership of PM3. Thus, Filipino missions promises to be an integration and mixture of these three types of mission strategies (cf. Tizon 1999:12-21). This paradigm shift is most welcomed by the transformationists fed mainly by the writings of Maggay and the author.[9] In this paradigm there‘s no need for a cross-cultural missionary to stay long-term in an area. Their mission is to simply make a few converts and then disciple those con-verts to become able evangelists and disciple-makers like themselves. Then they can move on to another place to multi-ply disciples and "house churches" (or "simple churches" or "small Bible communities") to do IM (= CMM + contextuali-zation + community transformation) from town to town almost naturally without having to build complex church structures.
This integration has been working since the 1990s in actual mission work. Prominent Evangelical church leaders, espe-cially from Assemblies of God and CAMACOP got involved
in short-term pastoral leadership training modules in Indochina, sponsored mainly by Open Doors and also facilitated later by TNO and Ethnos-Asia (cf. Javier 2002:81). Since 1994, the author and his mission, Chinese Ministries International-Philippines (CMI-Phil) trained house church leaders in China to do IM in China. Since 2001, he focused on missionary training and mobilization of tentmakers, in which 104 tent-makers have been sent to China by November 2010. CMI-Phil even includes Roman Catholics who have led group Bible studies in Charismatic renewal communities in their mission team.
Interestingly, the Southern Baptists produced three impor-tant ingredients in doing IM: (1) their western missionaries (like Robert Clark and Paul Stevens) have led in advocating for and training in CMMs (cf. Claro 2004); (2) an ex-OFW couple, Art and Linda Elbinias through their "OFW Care" structure has provided a model for integrated missionary care; and (3) a Korean missiologist teaching at their seminary in Baguio City has spearheaded an ambitious short term mission program called "Asia Vision –STM 2015," which aims "to send 300 short-termers annually between 2006-2015 from Asia (especially the Philippines) to Asia;" that is a total of 3,000 to be mobilized by 2015 (Kim 2004:196). The program was pilot tested in summer 2003 when thirty-seven were sent to Indo-China (all raised their own funds), and repeated in summer 2004 when ninety-nine went to China, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh and the Burmese Karen refugee camp and Chinese Muslims in northern Thailand (:205-206); about 20 from the 2004 batch decided to become long-term missionaries in Laos, China, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia (:200).
Moreover this confidence has also been built through ac-tual ministry in using the IM approach to reach out to local UPGs especially Muslims in Mindanao, Metro Manila and other key cities where Muslims have relocated in recent years.[10] The more prominent ones are: (1) Love Your Neighbor founded by Florentino de Jesus, Sr. in 1980, which started as a department of Open Doors (Guillermo 1983:542); its move-ment is called "Project ISLAM" (= I Sincerely Love All Mus-lims); (2) SERVE-Philippines of the OMF-PHC, which was founded in 1997 to mobilize Filipino missionaries to reach out mainly to Muslim UPGs; and (3) the Bridge of Love Founda-tion that has effectively used the transformational development approach to reach Muslims without leaving their cultures and communities. Others can not be mentioned due to security reasons.
Diasporal
Though sharing in the same vision and mission, yet there is a fourth major stream that has yet to be fully integrated into PM3.[11] The diasporal or OFW churches have been interact-ing with churches in the Philippine and their theological ethos and missional paradigm are akin to the Evangelical and Char-ismatic/Full Gospel streams. While they have strong links (usually on the giving end) with their "denominational affilia-tions" in their motherland, most of them have been connected loosely (and conscienticized to go into cross-cultural missions) through the Filipino International Network (FIN). These churches have half-consciously ministered cross-culturally wherever they exist, but have been slowly moving to a more intentional stance in cross-cultural missions.
The person most active, in promoting this is Rev. Joy Tira, a Christian and Misionary Alliance (CMA)-Canada pastor, who was able to move his church, First Filipino Alliance Church (FFAC) to give him the time and resources to organize and manage the Filipino International Network (FIN). He con-siders in his participation in April 1994 in a conference on mobilizing the diaspora (not only of Filipinos, but also Kore-ans, South Asians and Africans) of CCC leaders from USA, Europe and Philippines, as the start of his call to this ministry (Tira 2004:104). As he went on to survey the needs in the Mid-dle East, he found that Filipinos were among the "most aggres-sive" and effective evangelists to Arab Muslims through "Operation Trojan House" (Manze 2004:240). This motivated him to meet the leaders and attend the conferences of the Euro-pean Filipino Christian Workers Network, Filipino Japanese Network and those in Singapore and Hong Kong.
FIN held its first mission consultation on the "Filipino OCW Churches" in Cyprus in May 1995, which ended with the signing of the "Larnaca Covenant" which committed the participants "to recruit, train and mobilize Filipino believers as tent-makers and career missionaries to the 10/40 window and the world…" (:156-157). The second one was held in the Philippines in September 1996, with the participa-tion of Evangelical church leaders and Philippine government officials, and issued the "Puerto Azul Decla-ration." Tira was present at the PMA-sponsored 2nd National Tent-maker Conference in December 1996, where the greater role of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) was af-firmed (:158-159, 169-170). The then administrator of POEA (now Secretary of the government‘s Department of Labor and Em-ployment), Atty. Linda Baldoz, is an Evangelical Christian who sees herself as a key partner in PM3.
In 1997 FIN held a Filipino North American Prayer Ad-vance in Midland, Texas, and in 1988, three Consultations in Singapore, Bahrain, and Alberta, Canada; the last was for In-ternational Diaspora leaders which included South Asians, Chinese, Vietnam, Blacks, Persians, Japanese, Koreans and Spanish/Latins (:160). FIN held another consultation in Singa-pore in July 24-26, 2002, with Thomas Wang of AD2000 Movement and founding General-Secretary of Chinese Coor-dinating Center for World Evangelization (CCCOWE, founded 1976) as main speaker. He congratulated the Filipinos as the second Diaspora group strategically organized for world mis-sions (:160)
Since its start, FIN has aimed to mobilize the Christian Filipino Diaspora as "peace-makers" and "gatherers" trained to "multiply disciples" among the nations (:164-165). It has five
main ministries: Prayer Advances (a new spin on Retreats), Family Life Conferences, New Life Training Curriculum (forty training units on how to multiply disciples using CCC materials, in Tan 2004:184-195), Jesus Film distribution (over 50,000 in video and DVD formats distributed), and regional and international mission consultations (Tira 2004:161-163).
In anticipation of the Lausanne International Forum held in Pattaya in 2004, FIN held the "Seoul Consultation" on "The Filipino Diaspora and Missions," hosted by the Network of Filipino Evangelical Ministries in Korea (NFEMK) and some Korean partners. All the major papers were compiled and ed-ited into a book entitled Scattered; this was given as a free gift to each participant at the Lausanne Forum. Although FIN started mainly with the traditional Evangelical mission para-digm of a Western Evangelical denomination (CMA) and a Western campus ministry (CCC), it has learned from the de-velopments of "Diaspora Missiology,"[12] as well as from the positive and negative experiences in evangelism of their con-stituents, so it will hardly have difficulty in working with the IM paradigm of their Philippine-based partners.
The success of PM3 will depend a lot on its ability to quickly mobilize and train these churches into cross-cultural missions in partnership with FIN. On the whole, mission awareness (much less proper missionary training) is still relatively low in most of the OFW churches. So the PM3 vision and goal to mobilize and train Christian OFWs already there would still re-quire some efforts.
Perhaps half of these OFW congrega-tions are intentional church-plants of forward-looking denominations in the Philippines as they followed the migration of their members and lead-ers. By 1998, Jesus Is Lord (JIL) had seventy-two churches abroad (plus 476 in the country) and Jesus Christ Saves Global Outreach had five abroad (plus seventy-eight in the country).[13] Vic-tory Christian Fellowship had twenty-four churches, including Bangladesh, Guam, Russia, Taiwan, Cambodia and Dubai, with plans to plant churches in thirty-four more nations in the next ten years (1994-2004) (Perry 1992:97-98). Others include Free Believers, Take the Nations for Jesus, Bread of Life, Love of Christ, etc.
Yet the other half came to birth almost naturally through the gathering and growth of cell groups and fellowships started by ordinary witnessing believers at their residence or work-place, as shown below in the following depictions of their min-istries country-by-country in the major destinations of OFWs. Filipino congregations globally started with effective minis-tries to reach out to their fellow OCWs. Not a few of their members have also been sharing their faith with their neighbors and colleagues from other nationalities, including those from among their host countries, "naturally" with hardly any cross-cultural training at all! They would have been much more effective if they received PM3‘s tentmaker training. This is now being remedied through the training teams sent out by PM3 and the new yet fast-growing Philippine House Church Movement.
FILIPINO INSIDER MISSIONS BY COUNTRY
Hong Kong
The second largest number of OFWs (after Saudi Arabia) is in Hong Kong, mostly working as domestic helpers (DH). In 2002 those were about 143,000 registered out of the 237,000 from all nationalities, and in 2004, there were only 126,500 left, yet still constituting the largest expatriate com-munity in Hong Kong (Felomino 2004:210-212).
The first Filipino Protestant church there was born in 1978, and by 2004, there were more than 100 (including Roman Catholics). In a 2004 survey of sixty of these churches, there were about 150 services and fellowship times with a total membership of about 5,000. About a quarter of them are led by tentmakers (DHs or professionals who lead their congrega-tions), because many of these DHs are from the teaching pro-fessions since Hong Kong employees want them to also be tutors to their children (:209, 214).
Almost all major churches there are supporting church planters and also donating towards land purchase and building construction of churches in the Philippines (:218, 221-222). Some have ministries to non-Filipinos: His Sanctuary Services has ministries to Indonesians and Sri Lankans. Ixthus sends tentmakers into China, and C&MA, too, had plans to send to Taiwan, Korea and Japan in 2004. Free Believers, JIL, Grace of Jesus Fellowship and His Sanctuary, Revival Christian Church have already extended to Macau, while the first two have also established churches in Taiwan (:219).
Japan
The third largest OFW community is in Japan, where about 240,548 were documented in 2001. 95 percent of them are female entertainers earning $800 per month, and these 185,000 send home a total of $200 million per year (Galvez 2004:255).
Most of the thirty Filipino churches belong to the Network of Filipino Ministries Japan (NFMJ) and work closely with Japanese churches. Most of them provide holistic care that seek to transform oppressed entertainers into servant-leaders in establishing churches in Japan and beyond (:264-266). A sig-nificant number eventually marry Japanese nationals, bear Filipino-Japanese children and reach out to the families and business networks of their husbands (:259-262, 266). One night club singer became a lady minister in a Japanese church, and another entertainer became a prayer mobilizer for Interces-sors for Japan (IFJ)!
Taiwan
Taiwan had about 91,000 OFWs by December 2004, mostly as factory workers in electronics, computers and ma chineries (55,000), caregivers (33,000), DH (1,000), fishermen (600) and construction workers (400) (Philippine Star, April 12, 2005:9). They are the second largest expat community (next to the Thais) and are preferred because of their skills and diligence.
There were about 7,000 church-going Roman Catholics and 4,000 Protestants with about 100 meeting points on Sun-day by early 2004 (Adhikari 2004:28). The three largest groups are Jesus Is Lord (JIL, with twenty-four fellowship groups), Word for the World and Free Believers Fellowship.
One Filipino missionary team has planted a Chinese church in Taichung, and many have won their Chinese spouses to Christ. But most found difficulty reaching out to local Chinese, because of the language barrier, miscommunication and igno-rance of Chinese culture and religion. The lively Filipino wor-ship services and Sunday Schools are good mainly for Taiwan-ese youth who are trying to learn English and some old people in wheel chairs brought by their caregivers (:281, 284). Many of them have determined to play an important role in cross-cultural missions when they learned in 2004 that two pastors have been tried, sentenced and heads shaved in preparation for execution in Riyadh (:282).
Singapore
The fifth largest concentration of OFWs is in Singapore, with over 50,000 as of 2003, mostly medical personnel, Infor-mation Technology professionals, DH and construction work-ers. Though informally meeting since the late 1980s, the KSPS was formally organized in July 1998. Five are led by Hawai-ian-Japanese, eight by Singaporeans, and only one has been accredited by the government. Three large churches have Fili-pino fellowships (Solano and Ysip 2004:273-274). Their main goals are to evangelize Filipinos through prayer gatherings, evangelistic meetings and sports festivals, raise funds for Phil-ippine calamities (like the 1990 earthquake and 1991 Mt. Pi-natubo eruption), help the Philippine embassy take care of OFW needs, and organize the Filipinos through the United Council of Leaders in Singapore (:274-276; Dimangondayao 2004:308). They have also planned to became a "strong mis-sion base in Far East Asia" (Solano and Yap 2004:278), but need IM training soon.
South Korea
And the sixth largest OFW community is in South Korea, where in 1994 the Philippine ambassador to the 30,000 OFWs there was also a pastor of a Filipino church there (Dumapias 2004:318-319). Ambassador Rodolfo Dumapias helped in or-ganizing the Evangelical Ministers Fellowship in Korea (EMFK) with the support of partner Korean churches which had Filipino congregants (:319-320). It has since been an ac-tive member of FIN and hosted the 2004 Consultation that produced the book Scattered.
The life and ministry of these diaspora churches will surely continue to influence the Philippine churches and PM3, since there is a lot of travel and communication back and forth as well as the financial capacity of OFWs and rising dependency of the homeland churches on their remittances. With these four streams coming together, Filipino missions will consist of a three-pronged approach, which constitutes effective IM: (a) "CMM by tentmakers" of PMA & FIN; (b) power evangelism and short-term training seminars of the Charismatics; and (c) contextualized holistic approach of the transformationists.
SPECIFIC CASES PER PEOPLE GROUP
Here are six "snapshots" of Filipino missionaries in the Buddhist world. Because of the sensitive nature of some con-texts, names of persons and places are not revealed, and not all details can be given.
Singapore & Hong Kong
In these two predominantly Chinese (folk Buddhist) socie-ties, Filipino OCWs have brought their non-Filipino "bosses" and colleagues to the Lord and to join their churches. Many of their non-Filipino converts have joined other churches where they could feel more comfortable in worship and fellowship.
Though several Filipinos work as professionals (mainly in middle management positions), the majority went in as domes-tic helpers in these two cities. They, esp. the latter, have done excellently. Many have been converted through the Filipino churches there, and these new believers have been trained to use the "Jesus" film to reach entire households for Christ. One who worked in the household of a Christian expatriate in Hong Kong shared her burden to reach the mainland Chinese with her "masters." They supported her to learn Mandarin in Bei-jing for two years, and so she has ministered in a city in central China for more than three years!
Thailand
Thailand is a Buddhist country where it is almost unthink-able for their citizens to convert from Buddhism: "To be Thai is to be Buddhist." It is with this major unreached people in mind that Dr. H left his prestigious work in one of the top uni-versities in the Philippines to teach in an equally prestigious university in a major Thai city some years ago. He had devel-oped his campus evangelism skills during his student days. So one of his favorite ministries in Bangkok is to serve as an ad-viser and mentor to the campus ministries there.
Meanwhile, his main witness is to share his expertise in his field of study, and share Christ with his professorial colleagues, most of whom are scholars in their own fields. He sees himself as a Christian serving a Buddhist nation to help train its next generation of leaders and help develop its potentials as a peo-ple. At the very least, he has helped encouraged and train the future leaders of the nation to have a positive view of Christi-anity.
Cambodia
Many short-term mission trips have been made into Cambodia since 1900s. Not a few Filipinos, esp. medical and educational personnel have stayed on for longer term ministries. Perhaps
the most effective one has been that of Mr. and Mrs. R who arrived in Cambodia with their two children with minimal pro-visions for their stay and without any supporting group. They went just because of a clear call to minister in that land. The husband was mainly trained as a church-planting pastor while the wife is trained in community development.
They proved that God‘s resources are found in the harvest. In just five years, their holistic approach has produced forty-seven churches in the villages surrounding their town. These churches had social impact in their respective communities; thus they have gained connections to top leaders in their prov-ince. Signs and wonders added to the rapid evangelization of their area. Most of their leaders have been trained in their sim-ple yet effective missionary training institute.
During one of the great floods that devastated their region a few years back, their exemplary relief and rehabilitation efforts were noticed by the government and secular media. In 2005 they received a donation of a huge property from a prominent Cambodian believer for them to develop into a model farm or the like. This has served as a good training center for Khmer missionaries to go to other unreached peoples in Indo-China and beyond!
Japan
Filipinos have gone into Japan to work mainly as factory workers, entertainers and English teachers. Most of them went in as non-Evangelicals and were "born again" through the wit-ness of several Filipino churches and fellowships there. One of the major ministries is Filipino Christian Ministry Network (FCMN) led by Ms. Hannah Galvez. They have specialized ministries to first-timers, returnees, those married to Japanese and mothers of Filipino-Japanese children (Japinos).
Most significant may be their ministries among Filipina entertainers, many of whom were converted after they had become wives to their Japanese customers. Galvez sees this as God‘s plan to raise missionaries from among the lowly, semi-educated women (cf. 1 Cor. 1:27-28). These singers, dancers and bar girls have become evangelists inside the closely-knit, homogeneous Japanese families!
For instance, a certain Shirley was a former model and nightclub worker who is now managing a construction busi-ness. She was instrumental in planting two Filipino-Japanese churches in Saitama and Kanagawa Prefectures. She is married to an Okinawan who now supports the Filipino ministry by offering their house for worship and outreaches.
China
Miss N is one of the hundreds of Filipino English teachers in China, where about 1.2 billion (out of 1.35 billion) are still unevangelized, in spite of the revival of the past thirty years. She felt God‘s call to China about nine years back, and went before making her decision to do it in a more permanent basis. She was able to recruit three other churchmates to go in with her, and they intentionally planned to work in different schools, particularly in Tibetan Buddhist areas.
Since she went in only nine years ago, she had the benefit of being trained to be an effective cross-cultural disciple-maker (esp. to lead IM). Within a year, she had fifteen bap-tized disciples; actually ten are disciples of three of her five disciples! Her teammate had another six direct disciples. When they returned to that city two years later, they found that their disciples have grown to nine known house churches, not counting those that may have been born in the cities where their other disciples may have gone as teachers.
In 2007, through one of her disciples who has graduated and was teaching in a rural school, she was invited to teach English in that school, two hours by car, one day in each weekend. The government officials in the village told her that she is the first foreigner to ever step into that area! Meanwhile, she has met a Chinese house church leader in her area, and introduced six of her disciples to him for absorption into the house church networks there. All her six disciples like attend-ing the meetings of the unregistered house church, and are therefore learning the Word more deeply in their own language and in fellowship with their own people!
CONCLUSION
We believe that as Filipinos continue to go abroad for work, more Filipino Christians will join them as tentmaker-missionaries, like the above cases, among the Buddhist peo-ples and cities. The Philippine Mission Mobilization Move-ment (PM3) is aiming to recruit at least 1,000,000 such tent-makers by 2020; and hopefully 250,000 will target the Bud-dhist world! May they be fully equipped to make disciples using the IM approach as they evangelize among the Buddhist cities and nations. May Christians worldwide support us in prayer as we seek to fulfill our role in world evangelization! (AFMI/ASFM)
ENDNOTES
[1] The National Statistics Office estimates a population growth of 1.95 percent, from 85.3 million in 2005 to 94 million in 2010. Even with reduced growth rate, the population is still expected to double to 141.7 million by 2040 (Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 5, 2006: A3).
[2] Cf. Baldoz 2004:41-42; which also quotes the Pulse Asia, 1st Quarter 2002 poll that shows almost 20 percent of Filipinos want to leave the country and stay abroad.
[3] This is higher than Harper‘s (2000:249) conservative estimate of 150,000, but lower than JIL‘s claim of two million internationally (:262).
[4] Lopez came from the corporate world, a self-supporting pastor and one of the first ACM trainees, who sought to win the Sikhs, and was appointed Administrative Direc-tor of ACM (1999-2003). As he was moving to transfer his base to the Middle East in 2004, and he served up to 2008 to move to do frontier missions.
[5] Kim 2004: 195, fn.1 also mentions the average atten-dance per church is about 35 adults.
[6] The Pentecostal denominations especially Assemblies of God, Foursquare and Church of God (Pentecostal) have followed the main evangelical paradigm, but their newer churches are adopting the Full Gospel approach.
[7] It was founded in 1995 by Atty. Gordon Robertson, foun-der and CEO of CBN-Asia and son of televangelist Pat Robertson. His burden for missions was kindled when he witnessed first-hand India‘s great need for the gospel in spring 1994. He found a kindred spirit in Miguel Alvarez, the then president of the Asian Seminary for Christian Ministries (ASCM) of the Church of God Cleveland; they gathered the key leaders of PCEC and PJM to establish ACM.
[8] These are Alliance Graduate School (Quezon City), Asia-Pacific Theological Seminary (Baguio City), and Koino-nia Theological Seminary (Davao City). Asian Theologi-cal Seminary is informally involved through Corrie De-Boer who heads its Masters and D.Min. in Urban Minis-try. The IRM Bible College has adopted the MDM to be the graduate training program for its denomination.
[9] The author labeled the traditional paradigm as "a third world church trying hard to do first world missions" (Lim 2003: 200, n. 26.), and considers the tentmaking para-digm to be "the only way to disciple nations" (ibid: 196-197, 200-201).
[10] Due to security reasons, instances of work among Com-munists and Muslims, especially in Mindanao and the Middle East have been given minimal mention in this work.
[11] By "full integration" is meant the inclusion of the OFW church leadership in the Facilitation Team of PM3.
[12] "Diaspora Missiology" is best summarized in Enoch Wan and joy Tira‘s joint article in Wan & Tira 2009:2754
[13] Directory in Evangelicals Today Centennial Issue 1998:
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