Sweet Family Time

As you know, the boys were here over the summer helping with surveys & other ministry needs. Mikayla was able to arrive the end of July, just in time for our whole family to spend a couple of days at the beach together! It was such a sweet time, made sweeter by the fact that Ben's girlfriend as well as our team were able to join us as well. It was a big, fun group, and we enjoyed sunsets, our favorite pizza restaurant, spikeball, worship time together & swimming in both the ocean & the pool. So incredibly thankful for this time together!!

This time was a gift straight from the hands of our good Father.

 

Big News & a Big Meeting

We have some BIG NEWS to share - our teammates passed their Tagalog language requirement! This means that they can now move from their language-learning location to their ministry location (down in Bicol). Since our team house is not yet complete, they'll be camping out in a little airbnb for a couple of months - pray with us that we can finish their house quickly! 
This pic of our team was taken after some meetings we attended in a nearby country - we spent a day at the zoo after the meetings & had a great time.

Elephant rides were a highlight for sure!

While we loved the time with the team, we were also so blessed that some very old friends (my friends from high school!) joined us for the day at the zoo. Such a wonderful time catching up with them!

As for the "Big Meeting", we recently attended both board meetings and then the tri-ennial meeting where churches from all over the Philippines gather together to focus on how they can more effectively send out their own cross cultural workers - the nations reaching the nations! We were very encouraged by the results of the board meetings, and we're praying that decisions that were made will make a big impact on how they send.

The meetings themselves were also a blessing. Pray with us that God would keep bringing this focus to the front for our churches across the Philippines!

In the culminating service, four individuals came forward to say they felt called to be one of the ones sent to the nations. Pray for these individuals as they process through their calling & begin to count the cost.

Summer Teams

One of the things that has recently been happening on "the land" (see post below) was summer teams. We partner with Nehemiah Teams for our student teams over the summers, and we highly recommend them! If you have any young people who might be interested in summer missions, we'd love to connect with you! We had a team of ladies who lived on the land for the summer, helping with the agricultural & livelihood projects during the week and outreach Bible studies on weekends. 
In addition to the "ag" team, we also had 3 interns who came independently and had various responsibilities, including helping to coordinate construction, surveying unreached people groups, then the interns & ag team joined together to do a couple of youth events where they discussed God's plan for relationships before marriage. 
We are so very thankful for these young people who gave their summer (and for those who supported them!) to serve so faithfully. God used them in big ways!

How cool that they got to be part of a baptism!?!

The youth events were well-attended, and we're praying that God uses those times in big ways moving forward. The topic was definitely counter-cultural, and a challenging one for them to shift to a Biblical model. Pray with us!

The survey team (you may recognize a few of them - it was wonderful to have our boys back for the summer to help with this! And then Ben's girlfriend Katye was here, and our teammate Claire joined in too. They split into different groups at various points in the summer to travel to new areas for survey; this pic is of the report-writing that was necessary after every survey to make sure we have good record of all the information.

A little time out in the middle of the summer to re-focus & worship Him together.

Many of the team said that their time with the Manide tribe doing outreach Bible studies was a highlight, and one of the ladies from the team is praying about coming to join us for a 2-year term. Pray with us!

A few final survey pics. Pray as we follow up on the surveys and determine the best ways to engage in those areas. 

"The Land"

When God first provided the piece of land, we tried to figure out how we would refer to it. It's located in the area of Cagmaslog, but that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue; and there are several different things all on the land - the Tribal Bible College, the BOOST livelihood + church planting training, a place for some of our church planters & more recently the construction for our team house (where our teammates the McCoys will live, and we'll have a studio there as well). Since there is so much going on there, it's often referred to as just "the land". 
We recently completed construction on the little duplex for our church planting team who live on the property. A couple and their baby are on one side, and our single teammate is on the other. 

Meanwhile, construction on our team house is going full steam ahead.  

We just finished a critical phase the with pouring of the roof slab. It took 50 guys about 36 hours working straight (in shifts) to complete the slab in one pour! So thankful to have that stage done safely & successfully. 

But there's a lot more than construction going on! Not only are there Bible classes going on as well as summer teams & agricultural projects, we have regular tribal team trainings as well as Agta church leader trainings going on as well.

We currently have almost 30 students in concurrent Bible school classes. There are a handful in the "diploma 2" (out of 7 total), then a bunch in the foundations semester.

Because we are now doing 2 different level classes concurrently, we set up a separate little classroom outside the main one. Not the best in rainy weather, but it works for the time being. :)

Thanks for praying with us for all that God is doing on "the land"!