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NewThing Philippines

Written by Eric Metcalf

It’s been just over a month since I traveled with a missions group to visit our NewThing Church friends, the Philippine Frontline Ministries.  If you’re not familiar with Frontline, Frontline was started by Jeff and Rowena Pessina over 28 years ago. It’s an amazing church that is extraordinarily passionate about helping people find their way back to God.

Now I wouldn’t travel 30 hours just to say hello, my main purpose for going to visit Frontline was to help lay the groundwork for NewThing Philippines: a network of churches committed to reproducing churches. This vision really came from Jeff Pessina, Lead Pastor of Frontline, as he felt God was leading Frontline to partner with like-minded churches to help start more and more churches in the Philippines.  It’s truly inspiring and worth every hour I traveled. While NewThing is committed to helping people find their way back to God, NewThing is also committed to inspiring the local church leader to catch a vision for a movement – a reproducing movement – if God would bless it. That is exactly what God seems to be doing through Frontline.

So after a few meetings with Cliff Parrish (NewThing Network Coach and the man who began our relationship with Frontline) and Jeff Pessina, we started laying the ground work for NewThing Philippines. It started with me speaking to Jeff’s staff about the vision, practices and fruits of being a reproducing church.  That was our first step since Frontline has already reproduced in many ways, but was starting to experience the understandable stresses of it. This was a time of encouragement, training and story telling.

After meeting with the Frontline staff, Jeff, Cliff and I met with the local churches to share our vision for NewThing Philippines.  We had been praying a lot for this meeting and God totally showed up!  The pastors were very excited about the opportunity to partner with Frontline and NewThing.  There were plenty of questions, but they left inspired.  In fact, Jeff has already begun talking next steps with the churches to see if they are ready to dive in deep with the reproducing church vision – praise God!

Although I came to help lay the groundwork for a movement reproducing churches, God did so much more.  I saw hearts transformed, five families who lived in a garbage dump moved into homes purchased by COMMUNITY, visited the three Frontline campuses, prayed for the sick, visited people hospital-bound, attended a growing small group of 30 people that met in an alley, taught at a tent outreach, laughed and played with children who have been cared for by Frontline, and watched lots of people be baptized (including a young woman in our missions group).

Frontline is helping people find their way back to God and NewThing gets to celebrate with them. Thank you Frontline for your vision and leadership – you are making an impact for God and am proud to serve alongside you.

Please pray for Frontline as we seek to partner together to further God’s vision for a reproducing church movement in the Philippines.