A Passion for Christ

A cold front passed through the Philippines a few days ago. I woke up one morning and my thermometer read a bone-chilling 67 degrees! Well, that’s about as cold as it gets here in the tropics. Coats, jackets, and seldom-worn sweaters come out. Some parents debate whether it’s safe to send their child to school.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a few days in Thailand meeting with over a hundred of my ministry colleagues. What I heard there was both encouraging and disturbing. I was encouraged by a renewed focus on personal spiritual growth and maturity among our mission workers and leaders. But discouraged by reports that, around Asia, the rate of church growth is decreasing.

God is certainly still at work throughout the world, but resistance to the gospel is accelerating at an alarming pace. As I have expressed in previous updates, the harmful influences of our secular western culture are penetrating like a plague into the interiors of Asian countries, hardening hearts and minds to spiritual truths.

This has led me to revise my mission goal. Before, my goal for the past 15 years was to help initiate a CPM (Church Planting Movement) in the Philippines. I certainly still desire this, but I realize that CPMs are not happening because so few have a passion for Christ, a passion that is born out of a brokenness before the Lord and a hunger for holiness.

Therefore, my new goal is to help lead Filipinos to become passionate in their love for Christ. I suspect that if enough Filipinos become champions of faith, church growth will take care of itself. This new goal involves leading Filipinos to faith in Christ, to know the love of Christ (as Paul prays for over and over in Ephesians, Colossians, and elsewhere), and to be alert to our secular pop culture that offers substitute passions and battles against a Christian worldview.

This new goal also requires me to be passionate in my love for Christ, which involves brokenness and holiness. So please pray for me, PLEASE, that I will “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, pleasing Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened by His power…” Salamat (thank you!).