Hello, My name is David Shetler

I am very thank-full to the LORD for giving me this opportunity to talk to you about a wonderful mission we have going on in the Philippines, that is bearing a lot good fruit for the LORD.

First, I want to Praise the LORD for the many blessings he has given this ministry.

Second, I want to thank the many people and our Sponsors who have supported this program, especially the (host family sponsors) - they are tremendous people that have answered the call to serve the Lord. They have been very instrumental in helping us achieve our success.

What Are The Host Family Roles?

They provide 50.00 dollars a month of support to their preacher. They help to solve problems and provide continual encouragement to their preachers. They become a Christian family working together to bring SOULS to Christ. The host families have been tremendous in our success.

You might be saying 50.00 dollars a month is not much support. Well, considering Our preachers are dedicated full-time preachers, they do not have any other employment. Most receive none to only a small amount of financial support from their congregations. Some receive only food from their congregation, in the form of rice & vegetables from a local member’s garden. Occasionally, if they are lucky, they receive fish. So, 50.00 dollars a month is a big lift for the preacher and his family.

We are currently supporting 10 preachers and 12 COC Congregations. Two of our preachers are preaching at two different congregations.

With the help of our LORD, we provide these 12 COC congregations with other resources like: Bibles, Song books, Bible Study materials, Children Bible Class items, vitamins, medicine, and a host of other items, as well.

Production

We have produced 232 Baptisms, in just 17 months of working in the LORD’S Vineyard. (That averages out to be almost 14 Baptisms per month). These 232 Baptisms are only from the Adopt a preacher program. With the help of our Lord and savior, we do have more Baptisms to report from our Bible campaign. I will discuss our Bible campaign later.

In addition, when we Measured Church growth over the past 17 months. We have increased worship service attendance by an average of 14% among our 12 churches.

We were able to produce these results for our Lord, in a country that was experiencing one of the worst virus crisis situations, in all of Southeast Asia. However, with the help of the Lord, we were able to overcome the virus crisis, and many other challenges as well, to accomplish the will of the Lord. Imagine 232 SOULS were brought into Christ family! Praise the LORD! Certainly, the angels are rejoicing in heaven.

Children Feeding Program

Approximately, one year ago we launched a children’s feeding program. We our currently supporting five children feeding teams. These teams go into various communities and perform 1-2 children feeding sessions per month. Often, they go into the rural mountainous regions where the poor malnourished children reside. To date, we have fed a total of 2,117 malnourished children. We gave them a healthy meal, we taught them Bible lessons, sang songs of praise to our Lord, and played games. Our goal is to win hearts & minds for Christ! Here is a very important point, before we departed, we try to schedule the children’s parents and neighbors for a Bible study lesson. We are having tremendous success with this program.

Preacher Training Center

We launched a preacher training center at one of our congregation’s.
We are training 11 young men annually to be preachers and leaders in the church. One of our preachers designed the program, he is a prior Cebu Bible University Church of Christ Professor. So, we know that we have high quality preacher training in place. In addition, we can keep our costs down because our preacher is using his congregation, as the training center. The students will graduate after one year of study, so we will be able to send about 11 young preachers into the Lord’s vineyard every year.

This is very important, because we will be able to send these young preachers into the rural mountainous regions, where there are many small churches, they can help PREACH and become leaders in those congregations.

Bible Campaign

We have a very robust Bible campaign that is bearing a lot of good fruit for the Lord, as well. We discovered in the Beginning of our ministry that many churches in the Philippines have few Bibles. Maraviles Church of Christ on Leyte Island only had two old & worn-out Cebuano Bibles in their congregation. So, their members and visitors were limited with studying God’s word during worship services.

Well, our ministry is trying to fix this issue. With the Lord’s helping hands, to date, we have distributed about 1384 Bibles to 42 COC Congregations in the Philippines. (This is a Combination of English & Cebuano Version Bibles) Cebuano is the native language in the main area of our focus, which is the Central Visayans Region in the Philippines).

As a result of those efforts, we believe that we have helped produce another 188 Baptisms. Something interesting happen as soon as these New Bibles arrived at those churches, we had an explosion of Baptisms, often in the first week or two. One church reported 15 Baptisms, another church reported 10 Baptisms, so on and so forth. That is how we were able to record 188 Baptisms.

Then there is another issue regarding a lack of Bibles in the Philippines. Not only do the congregations not have Bibles, but many people do not own a Bible in the Philippines, as well. You are probably saying how can that be? Well, many people in the Philippines are poor. Plus, there are a lack of Bible stores in the Philippines.

On Cebu Island where I resided, the second biggest island in the Philippines, Cebu Island has only one complete Bible store on the entire island. Imagine people that live in the rural or mountains regions, they live several hours away from the Bible store. How are they going to get there? Some do not have transportation, even if they can find transportation, they do not have the money to purchase a Bible. So many people walk around in life not owning a Bible in the Philippines.

Also, what we discovered with the Cebuano Bibles, is that many church members had never seen a Cebuano Bible in their entire life. Can you image the power of reading a Bible in your own language for the first time. That is why distributing these Cebuano Bibles is so very important in saving Souls for Christ. We are working very hard to place Bibles both English & Cebuano versions into the COC congregations, and into people’s homes.

Baptisms

So, when we put all this information together, counting the total number of Baptisms that We have produced, from both our preacher program and the Bible campaign, with our Lord’s help, we were able to produce 420 Baptisms in as little as 17 months. (So now we are talking about averaging 24 Baptisms a month).There are many large cities in America, adding up all the COC congregations in that city, they are not averaging 24 Baptisms a month. Thanks to our Lord for this and the other wonder accomplishments, that we have achieved so far. Our Lord deserves all the credit.

As Jesus said in Matthew 9:37 the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Certainly, the harvest is plentiful in the Philippines.

Challenges

We have MANY Challenges!

We need donations, we need funding to keep these wonderful programs running for the Lord. If I could pick just one program that needs the most help, that would be our Bible campaign. We need a lot of help with our Bible campaign.

Here is Why:

We have distributed 1384 Bibles to 42 COC Congregations. But there are another 110 COC Congregations that need Bibles as well. That is just in our area of focus. Our area of focus is the Central Visayans region, where I resided. However, there are many other areas in the Philippines that need Bibles as well. These Bibles are CRUCIAL for spreading God’s word and bring SOULS into Christ family in the Philippines.

An interesting point about these Bibles, Filipino families tend to be large in number, usually 6-8 members per family. One Bible can be shared by all family members. So just one single Bible as the potential to reach 6-8 people. We distributed 1384 Bibles, that have the potential to reach 7 to 10 thousand people. We would love to add to those numbers, and distribute another 5 to 10 thousand Bibles. Imagine how many thousands of people we can reach for the LORD! Well, we can reach 50,000 to 80,000 people. That would be a great accomplishment for our LORD! I’ am pleading with you, to please be a part of this mission, to reach 50,000 to 80,000 people for our Lord.

We have had success getting English Bibles donated to us from other local Church of Christ congregations. If you can donate some English Bibles, we would really appreciate those efforts. Where we need the most help with our Bible campaign is with purchasing Cebuano Bibles.The Cebuano Bibles cost about 9 dollars each, if we buy 100 Bibles. However, if we buy 1,000 Bibles then the cost is significantly reduced to about 3.70 a Bible. As you can see, we can save a lot of money by purchasing 1,000 Bibles. I am asking for your help, any help, assisting us with placing 1,000 Cebuano Bible orders. If you can help us in any way, our Lord, and the Philippines mission, will greatly appreciate your help.

We see in MATTHEW 10:41 the text says: One who receives a righteous man, in the name of a righteous man, shall receive a righteous man’s reward. We also see that an unnamed man helped provide Jesus with a donkey, so that Jesus could make his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. This man will receive his reward for helping Jesus.

We have righteous people working very hard to spread God’s word in the Philippines. They are doing a great job bringing SOULS to Christ and growing churches. Please help us “Fight the Good Fight” and you will receive your reward.