DAVAO CITY, Philippines — Chris Cook, pastor of Parkade Baptist in Columbia, Mo., didn’t know what to think when Pastor Mayinto Ganzon reached out to him on Facebook in November of 2023.

Cook was a little skeptical at first, but he replied.

“I wasn’t going to just delete the message,” he said, “So I responded to figure out if he was real.”

He was real. After some messaging back and forth, Cook agreed to lead an online Bible study for Ganzon’s congregation on the other side of the world, Grace Baptist Church.

“It was truly a modern-day ‘Macedonian Call,’” Cook said, referring to the story in Acts 16 when the apostle Paul received an urgent message in a dream to come to Macedonia to share the gospel.

Not long after the initial online Bible study, Tivis Boothe, pastor of First Baptist Diamond, Mo., also heard from Ganzon. He was skeptical as well, but he couldn’t say no to the request for Bible studies, so he began leading sessions for them as well. 

“I had no idea what to expect,” Boothe said. “I Zoomed into a home with a small congregation just eager to study the Bible, and it was a great time. They were excited, enthusiastic and desired more from the Word of God.”

That one turned into two, three, then four. Boothe eventually learned about the connection with Parkade Baptist, and he and Cook began to explore how they might help fill the church’s desire for more teaching and discipleship.

Rather than just teaching from afar, the Missouri churches decided it was best to travel to Davao City in the Philippines to help teach and train the congregation and its leaders.

Cook is a volunteer with the Future Leadership Foundation, a ministry that develops Christian leaders globally to help reach people for Christ and equip them for ministry. With that group’s backing, two people from Parkade and four from First Baptist — including a native Filipino — traveled to the Philippines on Jan. 27-Feb. 4.

The Missouri team exchanged the frigid temperatures at home for sunny days in the 80s as they landed in Davao City. They soon began an intensive discipleship training at Grace Baptist for the church’s members and its two pastors, as well as three other pastors from other parts of the Philippines.

“They had planned well,” Boothe said of their hosts. “The discipleship training was intense, and they were ready for it.”

Across six three-hour sessions, they taught a survey of biblical discipleship, spiritual disciplines and the inner life of a disciple, evangelism, one-on-one discipleship and hermeneutics and basic biblical interpretation principles.

One of Grace Baptist’s goals was to foster a thriving children’s ministry, so church members and the team conducted children’s festivals at two different locations. The first was on a Saturday morning in a jungle region where the congregation had planted a church, and the second was at Grace Baptist itself. They also led a youth event, teaching on dating and relationships from a Christian worldview.

The Missouri team got to participate in 21 baptisms, eight of them in the Bay of Davao in the Pacific Ocean.

“This was a trip that allowed us to fulfill the Great Commission to a greater extent,” Cook said. “We were making disciples of other nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe what Jesus taught us.”

But beyond just a one-time meeting, the three partner churches believe the partnership can and will go on. Ganzon requested mentorship from Cook, and both Missouri congregations are planning on three- to five-year partnerships and future trips.

“I foresee us heavily investing in their leadership and in their core group so they can then go and invest in others as they assimilate into the church,” Boothe said.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Brian Koonce is a staff writer for The Pathway, news journal of the Missouri Baptist Convention. This article originally appeared in the Missouri Pathway.)