From janitor to secretary to president, every employee of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Philippine region spent a week giving away brochures for their region’s launch of the world church’s Sow 1 Billion campaign. The plan is to pass out 1 billion brochures globally, inviting people to Bible study, and each church region is preparing methods of following up with Bible study leads.
September marked the launch for both the Northern Asia and Southern Asia Pacific church regions. In the Southern Asia Pacific region, church members visited some 20 cities giving away brochures.
In one of the visits, police-escorted caravans carrying hundreds of Adventists and friends crisscrossed the vast island of Mindanao in southern Philippines as they reached out to thousands of people with a message of hope for peace in this war-torn region. This church-initiated “Go for Peace-Mindanao” caravan handed out close to half a million leaflets inviting people to try God as a solution to the most sought-after peace problem in Mindanao.
“We recognize the Adventist way of solving crisis in Mindanao,” says a Muslim mayor who was a product of Adventist education many years earlier. “We believe that you have the message for our people.”
Adventists in this region are optimistic about the results of Sow 1 Billion. “With the 28 million populace of Mindanao, Adventist regional leadership plans to saturate the whole [region] with 20,450,000 pro-peace pamphlets allotted for the Southern Philippines,” says Wilson C. Catolico, church personal ministries director for the region.
Leaders in the Northern Asia Pacific region are also reporting a successful launch. Their plan is to invite more than 56 million people to study the Bible by next year.
A Sow 1 Billion coordinator has been appointed in each of six church areas: Hong Kong/Macao, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan and unorganized territories.
“Our division has developed a very clear strategy for Sow 1 Billion,” says John McGhee, Sow 1 Billion coordinator for the church in the Northern Asia Pacific region. He says this can be accomplished if each church member commits to sharing an average of two pamphlets per day for one year.
