Dear Balikatan Family,
Every year we look forward to sharing what God has done on the campuses, in the workplaces, and through the IVCF Staff Team you have partnered with. This year, more than a report, we would like to share a story — one with the kind of plot twists that only God writes.
If you had to picture this year in a single image, it might be a field finally seeing the fruit of four years of replanting since the pandemic emptied our campuses. Some rows are already green — Metro Manila, Cebu, Isabela. Others are still freshly turned soil, the seed only just in the ground — Eastern Samar, Biliran, South Cotabato. Our Graduates Ministry, three years into rebuilding, calls itself a sapling: small, easy to overlook, but rooting deeper than it looks. Our staff team is the crew of farmhands who never left the field even when a few hands had to go home this year for their own families — fewer than before, tired in places, but still out there before sunrise, tending what’s been planted. And the team that keeps the water moving to every field — the irrigation channels of administration, finance, and fundraising — spent this year clearing out channels clogged by years of neglect, and watched these channels carry more God-sent rain than before.
This collage of images is the story of what God has done in IVCF the past year.
Roughly half of every IVCF staff worker’s salary this year came through you — Balikatan and our other North American partners. That is not just a number to us. That is Raymond, a former Bible-study attendee in Isabela, now leading his own Bible study because a staff worker had the time to train him. That is two new fellowships in Negros Oriental, an area that has had no full-time staff at all since 2019, flourishing because of the work of graduate volunteers who came up through the very pipeline you helped fund some years ago. That is forty-four staff members — some of them, quite possibly, students you once prayed for — still showing up to disciple a generation that is more anxious, more digitally scattered, and more spiritually hungry than the one before it.
This was not a year without strain. Typhoons and volcanic activity cancelled training events in Western Visayas. Two regions are short-staffed and seeking new recruits. The national numbers show that we are still better at helping students believe than at helping them become disciplers and missioners. While we have a good number of individual student-leaders, only 9% of our chapters have reached that mature stage where the fellowship is run entirely by students and the fellowship is intentionally engaging their campuses. We tell you this not to discourage you, but because you have walked with us long enough to understand the seasons of individual and chapter growth.
And yet across our nine regions, God has been raising a harvest. Students and graduates have been answering God’s call to extend His kingdom in their campuses and workplaces.
Turn the page, and let us show you.