About Marinduque

I was assigned to Marinduque as a Strategy Coordinator and started working on it as early as November 2005. I moved to Lucena city where I can take a boat ride to Balanacan and a jeepney ride to Boac, which is the main town of the island of Marinduque.

Arrived in Boac alone with a Bible in my hand. I begin to walk around the market area and along the road under the heat of the tropical sun. I kept asking people on the road if they know any Baptist churches in the town. None of the people I asked was able to pinpoint any Baptist churches. They are strongly devoted Catholic.

I saw the sign of a church on the road which says The Gospel Church. I took courage to walk in and met the pastor there. I sat down and built a relationship. It took only three meetings for us to be close together. His wife passed away some 14 years ago and left him with four small children. He still remains widowed even though three of his children have graduated from college and two of them have a job.

Boac is a town and it has 61 barrios. I work with the pastor in outreach to the barrios, which have no evangelical witness, and train small group leaders according to their ability and experience in life. For example, with a director of a government office, I will not ask him to sit in a class with 13 year old boys and girls and train him T4T and give him a photocopied certificate. I would rather have a prayer breakfast with him and discuss the burden to reach the people in Marinduque for Christ. I will learn a lot from him.

At this time the pastor and I have five outreaches. As soon as there is a small group leader we will move to another barrios to start a new outreach. One of the outreaches in Tagvag has 105 people attending and they meet on Sunday afternoons.

I have begun planning my weekends to go to Marinduque to train small group leaders.

It is exciting to work with Christians of the same faith.