Lamane: March 2009

Monday, March 30, 2009

Back Home Until Next Year

Pops returned home a little over two weeks ago and had an overall good report from his time there. He had good concluding meetings with the Lamane church leadership in which he challenged them to take steps to reduce the roteness and monotony of "church as usual." Specifically he encouraged them to change their traditional "Sunday school" to smaller group settings throughout the week in the various sitios (the idea being to encourage greater community interaction and less "religious" activity).

Pops also spent a significant amount of his time during the last week encouraging the laity in both Lamane and each of the other outlying sitios to increase their fellowship with each other to promote spiritual stimulation and greater accountability.

Though some of this will be redundant for those of you who have been following the blog, I thought that you would enjoy seeing a letter that Pops just wrote to summarize his '09 trip. It is as follows:

Thank you for your interest, prayer, and financial contribution to my
recent ministry to the Tagbanwa church in the Philippines.

There are seven different Tagbanwa church communities. Only
one has elders. Some of the others have relatively solid leadership, and
some have so little that they can hardly be called a New Testament church.
I met at each of these weekly, as well as with several subgroups. For over
half of these meetings, I traveled a short distance by
motorcycle.

While I am frustrated with the lack of true spiritual
leadership in the church, I am also encouraged by the level of interest in and
hunger for God’s Word. I taught Ephesians. I had enough time to be
repetitive with the message – an important component in teaching the
Tagbanwas. People loved it! They looked forward to our meeting
times. We shared together, prayed together, studied together, strategized
together, and learned together.

I encouraged them strongly to view
my time there as a training time; a time when they would particularly focus on
reading and studying daily. As much as I enjoyed giving, I told them it is
not about my joy, but rather about their learning, their recognition of who
Christ is, and His glory being manifested in and through the church.

Ty, my second son who grew up there, came midway through my time
there. Mike McMahon, from Bay Area Community Church, our home church,
traveled with him. Mike was able to share almost daily at various venues
in the greater community, using a Tagbanwa translator. Mike’s story was
relevant and dynamic. Ty met with the younger men in the church. His
objective was to encourage them on to being good fathers and to begin seeing
themselves as leaders. The people aggressively embraced both of them and
their efforts.

The bottom line was that Christ would be
elevated to His proper place of authority in life – both theirs and ours.
Let’s pray for each other to that end.

Again, thanks for your
investment in the greater body of Christ

May He be
glorified,Tim

As Pops said, thank you again for your continued investment in this member of Christ's body. We were very blessed to hear from so many of you that you have been supporting Pops and the Tagbanwa churches with your thoughts and prayers. Also, we were again amazed at how God has so effectively provided for the financial needs of this work with so little effort on our part.

God Bless,

Tim Mewmaw

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

More Encouraging News

The latest from Lamane is a series of heartening news.

Pops' leg is on the mend; he's finished with the antibiotics and says that his leg seems to be healing well.

Pops agreed to teach last Sunday and he said that it went very well (this has not been his typical practice because he's been trying to encourage the tribal leaders to be more autonomous). His text was Colossians 1 & 2 and he said that people were very attentive. After preaching they worshipped for awhile and he said that it was very good (nearly brought tears). They then read several texts and sang again while taking the Lord's supper. Pops said that the whole service was very stiring and was a real blessing to him.

Later Sunday night Pops got together with a group of the elders and they had a very encouraging meeting. They discussed bringing a new member into the leadership and it went very well. One of the real challenges over the years has been the tendency toward factionalism and resistance to change. Pops felt like the meeting went a long way toward starting break from those patterns.

The last exciting piece of information is that one member of the church has begun meeting with another member of the tribe to seek some public reconciliation. Pops says that this is a direct result of Ty and Mike's interaction while they were there.

All-in-all a lot of good news. Of course there continues to be a lot to pray for: Pops is only going to be there another week and we need to be praying that he ends strong and that the people will continue to ruminate on the things that he has worked on during this trip. Also, while it is healing, we should continue to be praying for Pops' leg to fully recover. Finally, the realities of the local economy are far worse than we can even imagine. Please continue to pray that the Lord would provide for his people there.

We have been talking some about ways that we could practically help with the current food crisis, so please pray that God would give us wisdom in knowing how to proceed there. Also, please consider combining some "works" with your "faith" if/when we can get a relief plan organized (see James 2:14-26).