Church Planting in Imus, Philippines
An update from Francis Mariano, Lead Pastor of Cross of Christ Salvation Gospel ministries (CCSGM), Imus, Cavite, Philippines...
In 2021 the Kawit CCSGM elders began praying for an opportunity to start a church planting mission in the province of Cavite. While praying for this project our lead pastor Jeffrey T. Jo created a church planting team and trained them for a month to lead the mission. As we continued to pray, the Lord led us to start a church in Imus, Cavite. In 2022 the following year, the Lord answered our prayers and we found a place to hold our first worship service on March 20.
We only started with 30 people in our worship service. By God's grace the team evangelised, ran bible studies and visited the area. The team offered free coffee for all to connect with the community, serve and make friends with them and share the gospel, and by God's grace some of the people who came to the church to drink free coffee now regularly attend the church.
Since then, we have run several events to reach the community around us. Last July, the team planned and conducted a medical mission with the help of some Christian friends who were doctors. The medical mission was attended by 45 people. We shared the gospel to them and by His grace some of them are now attending the church service. In December, we ran a gift giving event reaching 15 families, giving us the opportunity to share the gospel to them and they are now being discipled every Sunday. We continue to care for these people.
We regularly share the gospel in our community and plan to reach out to more souls with the gospel in our neighboring town as well. Moreover we have established a weekly prayer meeting every Wednesday at 6am, bible study every Friday at 7pm and a worship service every Sunday at 10am. We also have our Discipleship Accountability Group (DAG) where we group our men, women, young adults and youth into a small group and choose a mature brother to take care of them, encourage them and pray for them. We are also conducting a discipleship training course for our interns with the hope that they will be future elders full of love for the Lord, love for His word, love for His church and love for their families. We are praying for them that they will continue to grow and be used by God for his church.
By God's grace and faithfulness, the Lord continues to work in the life of his church in Imus and has blessed the church with growth in numbers. Over the last year we have grown to about 50-60 adults every Sunday. We celebrated our first anniversary on March 19. Jeffrey Jo was invited to preach and it was a joy to baptise 6 people during our celebration.
Right now, our present challenge is the small space we have for our Sunday worship service gathering. We are praying for the provision of a bigger place to accommodate more people, especially on Sundays. We are also praying for more volunteer teachers for our Sunday school ministry because the children who have been attending every Sunday are also growing in number. In addition to this, we are also praying to develop more music ministry members.
In all of this, our focus right now is to continue to share the gospel of Christ, to disciple new believers, care for them, guide them to draw more to our Lord Jesus Christ and to be more prayerful as a church. Though we are very young in age as a church, our prayers and vision are to plant churches in our nearby provinces as the Lord leads us.
Thank you for this opportunity to share God’s grace in our church planting work in this region.
Soli Deo Gloria!
