Murrell Family Report
Cebu City, Philippines
Volume 5 - #22 – June 3, 2007
Howdy!
A busy summer has kept us jumping and as we close our 3rd Session for the year and transition to the end of our 11th Mission Tour here in Cebu City we are dealing with many different emotions. On the one hand, we are quite eager to visit Texas and see our families and friends, but we are a little disappointed that the last two years passed so quickly. It seems that we just got settled into our new Bible Study Center and now we are less than a week away from leaving. WOW! Isn’t it amazing the difference a little time can make! The last time we were in this situation, we were uncertain when we would be back because we had so much “business” to accomplish. We were also looking at a situation where we knew that upon our return from furlough we would be hunting for a new office location. Now, just two years later, we are in a great place, with many great people helping us (on BOTH sides of the ocean), many people studying the Bible, and a new congregation of almost 20 believers exists in the city!
This is most likely the last report we will send out before we leave and we begin with the wonderful news of two new additions to the Lord’s family. One is Mr. Ben Bayaton, whom we first met through our seminar on Thessalonians, Shari’s dad taught for us. Ben is an older gentleman with many grandchildren that he loves to bring to the Center! He has been a very excellent and dedicated student and has brought a number of friends to the Center to enroll. He was immersed into Christ Saturday morning. We discovered that Ben has been on a journey for truth for some years and that we actually first came in contact with him back in the mid 1990’s. At that time he was a student of the World Bible School program we worked with, through Bob Marshall and Dick Ady, and he actually attended a study seminar that Bob and Dick conducted here in Cebu during that time. Ben showed us his attendance certificate for that series, which he had laminated and placed on his wall. He did not know of our former connection with World Bible School until we were talking one day at the Bible Study Center and he asked if we knew a man named Bob Marshall or one named Dick Ady! It is interesting to see how the principle of, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God grew the plant…”, can even span years before the fruit is harvested!
The other addition is not a baptism, but rather a sister "discovered" among the pretenders of the religious world. Virginia Kho has been studying with us since late last year and has taken almost every course we offer. She has studied the details of the Gospel from three different perspectives and each time the topic of immersion came up she insisted that what she experienced is exactly the same as what was presented in the studies. Even though most religious groups do not believe that immersion plays any role in a person joining with the death/blood of Jesus, it is not uncommon for us to discover that people who were immersed by such denominations did in fact themselves believe that immersion places a person “in Christ”. The group that she was studying with at the time of her immersion does not believe that baptism is important, but Virginia insists that she is one such person who believed that it was immersion that put her in contact with Jesus' death. She has been through some tough grilling on the matter by some of her classmates (who themselves were recently immersed into Christ), even sometimes to the point of argument, but she stood firm in her belief about what was in her heart when she was immersed. As a result, we had no valid reason not to accept her into the family – which we formally did today! The smile upon her face was no less bright than on the faces of those whom we have immersed. She finally found her way home!
With the addition of Ben and Virginia, it brings to 15 the total number of people we have helped find the Lord since our opening back in September! Please pray that all of these will remain faithful and grow strong and active in their faith!
With all this activity going on, perhaps you can see why it is difficult to leave! We have a number of other students nearing the time when they will be confronted with the facts of the Gospel and not being around to be part of the effort is difficult to accept. However, things are safe because our local brethren will continue handling the studies in our absence and more of the young Christians will have opportunities to serve and expand their faith!
Session 3 has been a blur! We have had so much to accomplish in preparation for our trip. How we have survived is a mystery! We have been busy making needed revisions to lesson material and printing copies for use by students while we are gone. We have been preparing promotional material for fund raising and reporting, updating and posting on the website our financial reports, preparing budgets for next tour, arranging our travel itinerary, buying tickets, making several frantic trips to immigration to secure the necessary travel clearances so that we do not lose our visas to return to the work, making arrangements for taking care of bills while we are gone, finding people to stay in our houses while we are gone, trying to arrange travel and visitation/reporting schedules for our time in the US, arranging family time with US families, making lists of things we need to get for the work while in the US, lining up people to teach classes at the Bible Study Center, arranging teachers for the Southside congregation we work with, storing and backing up many gigabytes of computer data, shopping for the trip, and packing!
Other than those things, life right now is pretty mundane!
We had graduation for the classes at the Bible Study Center on Saturday. I am not sure how many people we had, but I know that I printed close to 50 certificates! Among them, we had our first batch (of 9 church members) graduate from our 18-week study course on the Sermon on the Mount. The course met once a week for 2-3 hours and included three major exams they had to pass with a grade of at least 70! We are using this course our main “first step” after immersion for new Christians because the material is a concentrated collection of basic Christian principles that will help students expand their understanding of the commitment they made in the water of their baptism. Since other teachers have been handling the evangelistic courses at the Center, I have been teaching this course to the different batches we have at different stages of the program and the repetition of the material has been one of the most awesome experiences of my life as a Christian, and definitely one of the most fulfilling as a Bible teacher.
In addition, we also passed another milestone for the Greek students. They are now officially ¾ of the way through their training program and ready to go into exegesis once we return, Lord willing, in September!
Before I close, I must tell you of one of the most interesting experiences I have had so far as a missionary here in the Philippines! A few weeks back, I was contacted by a young brother living in Australia, named Ritchie Dona, who said that he was planning to come to Cebu, heard about us, and wanted to visit. He said that the main reason for his trip was to locate family members he had not seen in more than a decade and he hoped we might be able to help him. When we met Ritchie, we were surprised to see a person who looked every bit like a Filipino but who spoke only Australian because he had FORGOTTEN all the Cebuano he had spoken as a young child! (He was born in the Philippines, but taken to Australia at a young age and grew up there.) He had very little information to go on as far as finding his family was concerned but we managed and found ourselves in the house of his grandmother - a little more than an hour’s drive north of Metro Cebu City! She – together with the other relatives living close by – was ecstatic to see him but there was an immediate communication problem because the English of the family members was quite limited. So… this tall white-skinned foreigner from Texas (me) suddenly became “translator” for this young Filipino-like Aussie! How often does something like that happen? It was quite a situation to see, and one in which I definitely never in my wildest dreams thought I would find myself!
On the family side of things, Sara and Amy are in the final days of school. It is difficult to believe that Sara is about to graduate from high school! She has told us that she really wants to train and get involved in the Lord's work here with us and so we are looking at different options for her. Amy still has a couple of years to go and excited about being through with another year! We are busy packing up for furlough and Lord willing we will fly out of Cebu early this Friday, June 8, and experience that “miracle day” – where we leave in the morning of the day that we travel and arrive in the US on the same day about EIGHT hours later according to the clock, but with about 30 hours of actual travel in between! [grin] We are looking forward to seeing many of you and sharing first hand what has been going on in our lives during our time here.
As always, we thank all of you who continue to support us and pray for all we do for HIM over here. We could not accomplish anything without your partnership in the team! There may be many armies and battles being fought all over this planet at any given time, but there is NONE more important than God’s army and HIS war against the forces of the Evil One for the hearts of men! Please pray for our safe travel and for the brethren we leave behind to carry on in our absence, and please continue to pray for the lost all over the globe who are searching, that they may be contacted and enroll in classes, and for our brethren everywhere to be on the lookout to help them come to a knowledge of the truth!.
May God continue to give us all we need to serve him! To HIM be the glory!
Take care!
Barry, Shari, Sara and Amy
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