Hello from Southeast Asia!

We have been in the Philippines since Thursday and already so much has happened.  We are overwhelmed.  It is Sunday afternoon here and we have just wrapped up three days of a revival in a church here.  This evening we will go to a new church and do three days of services there also. 

 The church here is hungry for the Word.  We knew before we came that the Philippino church does not have the kind of resources the church in America has (by that I mean resources for teaching and studying the Word), but we had no idea how great the need really is.  We are only getting a taste of the situation here, but the truth is that the place is crawling with cults, and the church has no knowledge in how to interpret and understand the Word of God.  The one thing they do have, which we praise God for, is the Holy Spirit, who Jesus promised would guide us into all truth.  But on a very practical level, these churches have no training in understanding the Bible and there is so much hunger to know and understand the Word of God.  The pastors are pleading for help, for resources, for teaching, so they can teach their congregations the truth.  We visited the local seminary here and the situation is very poor.  They are lacking in professors and finances to operate sufficiently, and so they can only do a little for the men who are even able to attend.  We learned what the situation is with the pastor’s conference we are helping with at the end of next week.  There are some tribal pastors who will walk for 24 hours barefoot over rivers and through jungles to come to be encouraged in the Word, because they are so hungry for it.  Many of them do not even have Bibles.  Our church was able to raise enough money to help with the food for these pastors, but they are on their own getting here and many of them are very, very poor.  Vickie and I will encourage the pastor’s wives, but we are struggling to know how to encourage them, because we found out that every pastor’s wife must work all day, some of them in the fields, just to have enough food for their families because a pastor is not paid much at all.  Vickie and I are so greatly humbled by that because we are able to both stay home with our children and the church pays our husbands sufficient salaries. 

Please pray for all of us, Daniel, me, Greg and Vickie, that we would know what to share with these pastors and workers and their wives and families that would encourage them.  Please pray for the pastors who are traveling, some of them from hostile muslim areas in order to be encouraged.  Pray that the Lord would provide a way for them to come.  Pray for our team to be well in health as it is very hot here and it is easy to become dehydrated.  We do not ask prayer for our health because we want to be comfortable, but because if we are ill, the work we came to do cannot go forward.  Praise God all are well up to this point!

Will try to write more later.  Here are a few pictures.

Standing in the middle of a hanging bride over water.  You can’t see it in the picture, but people below are digging in the water for small rocks and pebbles to sell them to landscapers to make money for their families.

Our room.  We are staying with one of the denominational leaders who is the one organizing the conference.  (Don’t be fooled by the TV in the corner….it doesn’t work, it is just in there for some reason.) 

Some houses in the village near the hanging bridge.  We were visiting church members in their homes.

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