A Vision for the Filipino Youth
By: Jojie Wong
It has long been acknowledged that the youth have a huge potential for missions, and history has proven this to be true with the student movements in the past, which has born much fruit in terms of laborers for foreign missions.
The evangelical church and mission leaders in the Philippines have long acknowledged this as well and in 1993, the first of five National Youth Missions Conference (NYMC) was held—producing many youth who are engaged in global harvest. The movement itself from which NYMC was born, called the National Youth Missions Movement (NYMM) came out with the following vision statement in 2005,
“Raising generations of Filipino youth develop for cross cultural missions.”
This vision to see a missions movement among the youth was re-sparked with PM3’s global goal—raising 200,000 tentmakers and career missionaries by 2010. NYMM was represented in the PM3 facilitation team and they were positioned as the youth counterpart focusing more on laying the foundations for missions involvement among local church and campus ministries.
The movement produced not just workers for the harvest field but also trainings, conferences, prayer resources for the unreached, exposure trips and other missions awareness activities through the years.
The NYMM has since been renamed Filipino Youth Mobilization Movement (FYMM), acknowledging that in the recent years with global migration and the OFW phenomenon, Filipinos are not only found in the Philippines but are now widely scattered all over the world.
The FYMM recently hosted a consultation among youth leaders last December and is now hosting a bigger event focusing on the youth nationwide and hopefully even those overseas, through the Filipino Youth Missions Conference (FYMC) which will be held on April 8-11, 2013 in Cebu City.
The vision and theme of this conference is to see the youth engaged in the global harvest.
Just to expand on the theme, what we would like to see is that the youth’s passion be channeled to what God is passionate about, which is really to see every tribe, tongue, nations, and peoples worship Him. And for this to happen, we want to cast the vision to the youth, disciple them well and equip them to be engaged with the global harvest in whatever way they are called by God to engage—whether it is to be goers, senders, givers, trainers or even mobilizers.
May the Lord give us the privilege and honor to be part of sparking a missions movement among the Filipino youth for His global glory!
