This article was originally written by Stella McMillian and published to Baptist Press.
PHILIPPINES – Some of the places with the least access to the Gospel in the Philippines are small rural villages home to many Muslim ethnic people groups. Southern Baptist Filipino churches have begun sending out missionaries to these areas, but it’s often challenging for them to build relationships and be accepted by the villagers.
Simple health care strategies can help meet physical needs and open doors for the Gospel.
Mayumi, a Filipino missionary, remembers how challenging it was when she first began trying to share in these villages.
“For them, Islam is an important part of who they are and how they relate to everything in life,” she said. “[Also] I am a stranger in their place, and their language is foreign to me.”
As Mayumi and her missionary team continued visiting the village communities, they began to see families who had physical needs along with spiritual needs. Many families lacked access to clean water and had never been trained or equipped in healthy hygiene or nutritional habits.
The team shared their findings about the village with Tyrel and Nita Kilkenny, International Mission Board workers who help Filipino Southern Baptist Churches train and send missionaries. Tyrel and Nita encouraged the team to adopt a holistic approach, addressing both the physical and spiritual needs of the community.
The Kilkennys arranged training for Mayumi and other Filipino missionaries to learn some simple health care strategies, like how to educate the villagers about sanitation and nutrition, as well as how to help set up clean water projects.
Mayumi said the training helped her and her teammates feel more confident in offering basic health care skills to the villages they enter.
“When you address people’s physical needs, it opens doors to other opportunities of ministry in their life. It’s so important to people and so personal that it has a tendency to break down barriers and open up their heart because they feel cared for. They feel loved,” Nita said. “Addressing those needs naturally opens the door to share the gospel. And we’ve seen God work through that in incredible ways.”
For Nita and Tyrel, seeing Mayumi and a younger generation of Filipino believers equipped to reach the lost around them is the fruit of over three decades of investment in Filipino Baptist Churches.
They have served in the Philippines for 32 years and remember a time when Filipino churches were not reaching out to the rural villages because the violence of Muslim extremists led to fear and mistrust between the communities.
“When the Lord called us to do work among Muslims, we began to go to the churches and encourage them that God had put them where they are for a purpose, and that is to reach out to all the peoples, including the Muslim peoples,” Tyrel said. “And those churches are now becoming involved in cross-cultural ministry, reaching out to these Muslim peoples, and now we get to work together with them.”
Names have been changed for security.
