Murrell Family Report
Cebu City, Philippines
Volume 5 - #14 – October 9, 2006
Howdy! We are now well into October and it does not seem like over a month since I last wrote an update on the work here in Cebu City. Now I can say that we are back to normal because time always seems to jump in spurts when we have a session of classes going on. It is SO GREAT to be back into teaching and helping people learn about God, and having more of our members involved as teachers makes it even more enjoyable! I was doing some work today on the website and was surprised to find that we now have TWELVE teachers handling classes at the Center! Among the newest additions are our family members, Sara and Clint, who both successfully completed our formal 6-month teacher training course in the final session we had before we closed down the previous Center location last April. Having Shari and four of our kids working side-by-side with me is a dream come true!
The last time I wrote, we had just finished having our “Open House” and enrollment week and when the dust had settled, we had over 40 people enroll. Now we are starting week 5 of the session and we still have about half of the ones we started with – and there are some very sincere people. In addition, the newest congregation in the city, the Southside Church of Christ, started on September 17th with an attendance of 10! Since most of you are either on Jon’s report list or on Rachael and Clint’s you have received most of the details about these items and so I will mention some things they did not.
Most of our students are working-class people who live in the surrounding area and seem very happy to have a chance like this to learn about the Bible. Some are really struggling with what they are learning and I fear that a few are coming close to giving up their search. While we see this happen each session, year after year, it is nonetheless difficult to accept. Perhaps it is more noticeable THIS session because we have been “off” from teaching for a few months and having the new Center filled us with hope that things would be “different” in this location.
People – most of whom consider themselves to be very religious but have never actually studied the Bible in a serious way before coming to us – start out with high expectations of what they ASSUME they will find in their studies. After all, EVERYONE who has not studied the Bible very much basically believes that their church teaches what the Bible says and so if a different picture begins to emerge from the details of their Bible studies they quickly begin to feel a pressure welling up inside their heart! Once this pressure builds to a level of unbearable discomfort, they often question what they are doing! “Who am I to question the beliefs of our religion? Is it POSSIBLE that we are wrong in our beliefs? How can that be? God has been SO GOOD to our family for generations!” This confusion often leads many then to question the teachers… “WHO are these people anyway? They are not Priests/Pastors! They are just ordinary people like me! Why should I listen to them?” … These are some of the things that typically go through the minds and hearts of many of our students and so we try our best to watch for signs and talk to students and attempt to help them better understand what God is trying to say to them in the Bible. We try to be as positive as we can be, however, we also continue emphasizing that God’s TRUTH IN HIS WORD must be the foundation of FAITH, and not tradition, or feelings, or family! We also try to show them that "God’s kindness" does not necessarily indicate that a person is in fellowship with him.
We have had some success dealing with the “kindness” factor by helping students see the context of Romans chapters 1 and 2 – where in 2:4 the writer indicates that God's kindness CAN BE a sign that he WANTS PEOPLE TO CHANGE THEIR LIVES! We try to get the students to see that while God TRULY LOVES ALL MEN, he also WANTS ALL MEN TO COME TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIS TRUTH! (1 Timothy 2:4) Therefore, while it makes sense that he might take advantage of opportunities to be kind, even so, he evaluates his relationship with people based upon how their actions in life compare with HIS TRUTH and that no person is exepmt from this! (2 Corinthians 5:10 - After all, 5:11 shows us the rationale behind our evangelism, does it not?) As an added thought, We turn their attention to Matthew 7:21-23, where Jesus himself talks about the difference between CLAIMING to be his disciple and ACTUALLY BEING his disciple! We try to help students to see that the ONLY difference between "KNOWING" JESUS and HIM KNOWING US is whether or not the things we do for him are “the will of my Father who is in heaven!” Getting people to understand that you cannot simply CLAIM to have a relationship with God because you FEEL HIS PRESENCE in your life, and, that IF WE LOVE HIM then we must DO WHAT HE SAYS, is by far the most challenging aspect of our work! (As Christians it is also one of the hardest things to keep remembering day after day!) We ask that you please pray for our students, that they will rely upon what they have learned from the Scripture, and also that you pray that God will give us the wisdom and insight to help those who are struggling so that they will not snuff out the light of understanding that has now begun to illuminate their hearts and minds for HIM!
We have had some interesting things happen in the background lately. One such thing concerns our sign outside the office. Just after our opening, we began noticing signs of vandalism! Letters in the words began disappearing from the sign. In addition, we had been visited a couple of times by graffiti “artists” who spray-painted things on our pull-down doors. Our neighbors told us that they believed it was gang members or drug addicts that often prowl the streets in the wee hours of the morning. All we knew was that it was depressing and we were afraid that things might escalate to something greater if we could not find a solution! We decided to install small concealed security cameras outside so that we could monitor and perhaps even catch these vandals in the act! (The local police told us that if we could provide them with pictures they would be happy to track down the culprits.) We bought the equipment and added it into one of our office computers, then we strung all of the wire, and installed the cameras. It took us a couple of days to get the system running, but after we started monitoring it did not take more than a few days to discover the identities of our vandals. To our great surprise, it WAS NOT drug addicts, or gang members. Instead it was local children living only a block away from the Center! In fact, several of them live right across the street from Rachael and Clint and had been eagerly waiting for us to begin our “Saturday Children’s Class!” Oh! What a disappointment THAT was for all of us! We struggled about what to do. With printed pictures from the cameras for evidence, we informed the local police about the matter and asked for their assistance. As it turned out, one of the officers comes from the street where all the children live and he said that he would talk to the parents and assured us that the kids would definitely "learn a lesson" from this! (grin)
A couple of days later the officer came by the office and he said that when they visited one house in particular the parents were not home but the grandfather was home and when they told him what his grandson had done, and showed pictures we had printed off the computer of his grandson actually picking letters off of our sign, he called the boy and gave him a switching! While the police visits were going on we ordered a replacement sign - one that DOES NOT have letters that can be peeled off! I had just finished installing it the following Saturday when a group of the children involved showed up at the front door of the Center. Shari and I went out to see them and they immediately began saying, “Sir, Ma’am, we are so sorry for what we did. Please do not be angry with us! Please forgive us!” It was so neat to hear their apology and we eagerly accepted it. It is reassuring to find parents (and grandparents) who believe that it is important to make children take responsibility for their actions! An added joy in this was the fact that even though the kids got into trouble, they were still asking when we plan to begin our Saturday children's classes! (grin)
The following Monday Shari and I were "OFF" and Rachael called to say that the kids were at the Center and that they were sitting on the front sidewalk right beside the new sign. When she went to ask them what they were doing, they told her that they were GUARDING the new sign so that no one would do anything bad to it! (BIG grin)
There is a lot of activity at the mosque across the street from the Center right now because it is the month of Ramadan and so there is some official activity there each afternoon with a number of people attending. It has been interesting observing the goings on. We discovered that when they have their usual prayer times each day, the “call to prayer” is very possibly a recording of some kind because one afternoon I watched two small children playing a very intense game of tag inside the main prayer hall while supposedly the person inside was loudly calling to people through the outside speakers! I hesitate to think that those kids would have been acting that way IF someone had in fact been in that room speaking into a microphone!
We are so happy to be here and we are excited at all of the possibilities before us. We are greatly encouraged by all of the co-workers we have and THANKFUL for the opportunity you folks have given us to serve! Please continue to pray for our success in the efforts we have planned, and for the health of all the brethren, and especially for our family! As I mentioned earlier, please continue to pray for our students, that they will have the strength to replace what they had heard about God and religion from their past experiences with their new-found knowledge of the TRUTH of HIS WORD!
May God continue to give to all of us the strength and courage to live the kinds of lives we need to have in order to teach people by example!
Love and Peace to all!
Barry, Shari, Sara & Amy |
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