Key People: Marwin and Vida Pesuelo, Ella and Vic
We visited the Brooke’s Point area and were present at the training the team was leading that day. About 40 secondary students came to the training. ECPM had a team of three people there including Jason Paalan (see report on PHI05) that are the leaders of the work.
The team were teaching about relationships, they had ice-breaker games and several other activities. Ella, Marwin and Vida did the training. Vic was there too, however his role on this trip was to accompany the BHW team. They did team activities and discussions; it was quite interactive. It was quite long, from 9:00 am to 4 p.m.
ECPM is currently assisting with the development of campus ministries in two locations, one of them is the one we visited in Brooke’s Point, Palawan. The other is in a church that is fully funding the training and where there is a church planting team as well.
The team visits the campus ministry monthly to run a seminar with the members of the team and also the young people who have signed up to the programme from the schools. Currently in Palawan there are about 60 signed up from one secondary school, and one from another school. The leaders run weekly sessions with the youth in various locations. There are young people from five different churches involved.
Ella writes the curriculum and is the main presenter each time. Their goal is not just to get the youth into church, but to mentor them in how to be strong believers and followers of Jesus and to share this with their friends.
Every month for 10 months of the year the ECPM team visits the campus team for a weekend. They spend time with the leaders and run a training for the people who are part of the programme. This is usually an all-day event on the Saturday. Ella is the main leader and presenter of this.
The training is a 2-year programme and has five main components:
1) Preparing – they spend several weeks preparing those who have signed up to the programme from their schools. These are largely held with the whole group until they are comfortable together. They explain the programme and what they intend to cover in the course of the programme.
2) Gathering - here they get the group together and form them into small groups with a leader in each group. In Palawan they initially got them into church groups, but the young people preferred to stay in their school form groups all but one of them go to the same school.
3) Reaching – here they encourage the young people to talk to their friends and invite them to join the group. At the end of this section, they have an evangelistic event and many of the young people and their friends become Christians for the first time.
4) Building – this is the follow-up stage for new believers. This happens in the main monthly sessions but also in the weekly groups.
5) Channelling – getting them out into the community and into their churches so they connect with those who can continue discipling them.
When the team was in Palawan they did two sessions, one on spiritual warfare led by Ella and another on relationships led by Vida and Marwin.
Some previous groups have not continued; however, things grew out from them that were unexpected. In one, a whole new church has formed but the campus ministry has stopped. Some of those involved currently in training for church planting and in past teams have emerged from the campus ministry.
The campus ministry is a real help and model for local churches who do not know how to run youth programmes. There is a good spill over into local churches because of the activities of the campus work.
Several leaders of the campus ministry are leaders in other roles in churches and ministries.
Church leaders are very happy to see their young people being mentored and encouraged.
They think that this is an important level of ministry to be doing for the sake of the future and plan to continue it if they can.
It is not easy for Ella to be away every month to do this, and it is expensive to travel every month to far places like Brooke’s Point.
The young people are under a lot of pressure. They have questions about life and faith that the churches are not addressing so they get a lot of questions, especially around sexuality.
1) Ella and team are united and passionate about their desire to impact and influence young people.
2) There are two good groups in training currently.
3) That churches are becoming more interested in discipleship because of what they see happening in the campus ministry.
This appears to be a useful ministry, but it is hard to sustain and takes a lot of energy and resource. Ella is very good at communicating with the young people and Marwin and Vida are lovely with the young people.