Seven KESI High School students are working here on campus this summer vacation.
All students are required to work during the school year, but these seven requested to work during the Summer to earn money for clothes, school supplies and, of course, a cell phone. It seems like there is no life without a cell phone. Our students are also selfless as they also buy clothes and school supplies for their siblings at home in their villages.
Laymen Ministries’ Staff is delighted to have the students here as it gives us the opportunity to bond outside the classroom. While working in the garden, the pineapple, lemon, or banana orchard, repairing the gravel road or digging 2000 holes (2 feet x 2 feet) for planting cashew trees, we teach how to work, how to co-operate with other workers, how to budget time and keep an accurate accounting record of income and expenses. Most importantly working closely gives opportunities for spiritual discussions in practical Christianity.
During this school vacation time, we also visit native villages for Sabbath worship and to show the students what challenges they will have when they become leaders in their villages.
Since Laymen Ministries has a very effective Prison Ministry work here on Mindoro, we chose also to visit them and observe Sabbath behind bars.
The students were put at ease by the friendliness of hardened criminals with tatoos from head to toe. Most impressive was the inmates’ Bible knowledge and enthusiastic desire to share it, and their testimony, with everyone. In fact, two of my shy students were so comfortable and encouraged that they volunteered to speak during Sabbath School discussion.
At family evening worship that night here at the school, the student worship leader asked us all to reflect on what had encouraged us most by the prison visit. Everyone had the opportunity to speak, and we heard:
- Their enthusiasm to spontaneously respond to questions or ask them, and the large amount of Bible verses committed to memory!
- Their willingness to teach a day of the Sabbath School lesson when volunteers were asked for
- The importance of effective leadership
- The value of the “teach to teach” method. (The inmates are taught the joy of sharing their knowledge with other inmates. This method had led to evening Bible studies in every dormitory, led by inmates.) Since 2003 the fruit of “teach to teach” has led to 754 baptisms, including prison guards.
- The students expressed their joy at finding equality among the Sabbath worshipers, from the Prison Superintendent, who is SDA, to the maximum security inmate, to the civilian neighbors of the prison, who come into the prison each Sabbath to worship.
- Our students expressed their amazement that several inmates testified that they had never been to school, yet they learned to read with understanding while in prison by reading the Bible.
- Many appreciated the appropriate interaction between the speaker and the congregation.
We praise the Lord that our high school teenagers were inspired by sincere and meaningful worship. They have been exposed to “form over substance” before and it is a joy for us to see them positively responding to genuine worship.
For the past 19 years, Brother Louie Benitez and Brother Abel Miralles have been full time Laymen Ministries missionaries in the large federal prison here on Occidental Mindoro. Their faithful and patient leadership has crated an environment in which true Christianity is alive and is being practiced.
Some years ago there was a program “Each one win one.” Our inmate brethren have embraced this concept and taken it one step farther. After bringing a fellow inmate to the foot of the cross, our brethren discipled the babes in Christ and taught them to also “win one.”
Many times we have heard comments like, “you have a seminary behind bars.” It is true! Our born again inmates are diligent students of the Bible and avid readers of Sister White’s counsel. It is no wonder that civilians living within a 40 miles radius choose to travel to the prison and be fed by the ministry of the inmates who are “Free behind bars!”
Friends, we genuinely thank you for your prayers and faithful support of Laymen Ministries Philippines.