When Delyn Garcia moved from the Philippines to Israel in 2018 to work as a caregiver, her goal was to earn enough money for her family back home to build a house.
Yet life as an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) was extremely difficult. The first year, she had to pay back the agency 1 million pesos ($17,700), meaning that some months she could send only 10,000 pesos ($180) home to her family. Day and night, she cared for her employer’s mother, an ailing 91-year-old, cooking, cleaning, giving baths, and taking her on walks. She had only one day off per month. Homesick, Garcia desperately missed her husband and their two young children.
A fellow OFW knew of Garcia’s struggles and began sending her links to sermons by a Filipino pastor. One clip spoke deeply to Garcia: How can this guy know everything I’m going through? she wondered. She started attending her friend’s church group during the pandemic and accepted Christ a few months later.
Today, her purpose in life has changed. She’s shared the gospel with her family, OFW friends, and acquaintances. Since the Hamas attack on October 7, she’s led a weekly Zoom prayer meeting—connected to Rebuild City Church in Makati, Philippines—with about 28 OFWs in Israel and other parts of the Middle East. During a visit home in June, she watched as nine of her family members responded to an altar call and accepted Christ.
Her Christian witness has also made an impression on her Jewish employer. “He was amazed because he said, ‘You know, Lyn, I see people like you—they go to parties, they go with boyfriend, but you stay. And when I talk to you, you are always listening to [worship] songs.’” She added, “I am trying to share with them the gospel.”
Garcia is one of the millions of OFWs who have left the Philippines to find better-paying jobs in the Middle East or East Asia. Today, Filipinos working as domestic helpers, factory workers, engineers, nurses, and teachers are enmeshed in the fabric of society in countries like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong.
For the past several decades, Filipino Christian leaders have looked at this migratory pattern as an opportunity for the gospel to reach the unreached. If churches and ministries in the fifth-most-Christian country in the world could train and equip OFWs to become tentmaker (or bivocational) missionaries, how far would that go in fulfilling the Great Commission?
It’s a vision that has captivated both Roman Catholics (see sidebar) and Protestants, who make up 76 and 6 percent of the population, respectively, according to the World Christian Database. (An additional 18 percent are considered Independents, which includes unorthodox groups like Iglesia Ni Cristo.)
Yet the enormity of the challenges facing OFW tentmakers has meant the Protestant movement is still finding its bearings. Family separation, proselytizing restrictions, overwork, insufficient training, burnout, and abusive employers all make cross-cultural tentmaking missions difficult to actualize. While stories do emerge of Filipino housemaids bringing nonbelievers to Christ, currently many of the successful missionary activities by OFWs are to their Filipino kababayan (compatriots), like in Garcia’s case.
Lessons from the Philippines’ experience with OFW missions apply to countries around the globe, as Christians are currently the largest migrant group in the world. According to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of UN data and 270 censuses and surveys, Christians made up 47 percent of all people living outside their birth countries in 2020. The report also found that Filipinos migrating to the United States is the fourth-most-common route for Christian migrants.
This growth in Christian migration is changing how the church defines terms like missions and missionary and what missions looks like.
“There is a great deal of goodwill for this network of overseas workers,” said Filipina theologian Melba Maggay. “They are not coming as imperialists. … Unlike Western missionary movements, we’re coming as servants, both literally as well as metaphorically.”
From the Philippines to the whole world
OFWs, which the Philippine government defines as citizens working in countries where they are not citizens, reached 2.16 million in 2023. Meanwhile, there are more than 10 million people in the Filipino diaspora, which includes all ethnic Filipinos outside the Philippines regardless of their citizenship. The remittances of the diaspora made up 8.5 percent of the country’s GDP in 2023.
Throughout the 20th century, Filipinos have left their country to find better fortunes elsewhere, most notably in the United States. In 1974, then president Ferdinand Marcos Sr. codified Filipino migration in the Labor Code of the Philippines by creating the Overseas Employment Development Board to “promote the overseas employment of Filipino workers” to companies abroad. OFWs were required to send back money to the Philippines.
At the time, most OFWs headed to the Middle East, where an oil boom led companies to recruit Filipino construction workers and engineers. Filipina women started working in the Middle East and Asia as nannies, caretakers, or nurses for the elderly. The Philippines also produces more mariners than any other country in the world—400,000—making up a quarter of the world’s seafarers.
The financial benefit of working overseas is stark: In Hong Kong, domestic workers can make at least $600 a month, far more than the average of $213 a month back in the Philippines.
The scale of those emigrating abroad sparked an idea for David Lim, president of the missionary training school Asian School of Development and Cross-cultural Studies: Filipinos could become the largest mission movement in the world because “we have the largest migrant population that has been going from the international airport ever since 1975,” he said.
Lim got involved in tentmaker ministry in 1994, as he started the Philippine branch of China Ministries International and recruited mission-minded Filipinos to work as English teachers and professors in China. Once in the country, the missionaries would build relationships, share the gospel, and start small groups in their homes. By 2013, Lim had recruited 120 Filipino English teachers.
“Anyone who goes overseas should consider themselves disciple makers to disciple the nations to which they belong,” Lim said. He urged a mentality that any lay Christian could devote 10 percent of their time to do mission work wherever they are.
Shifting toward tentmaker missions
While the idea of tentmaker missions had been introduced in the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s, the Filipino church leaders held the first national consultation for “Tentmaker Missions” in 1994, Lim wrote. From there, the Philippine Missions Association (PMA) created a Tentmakers Task Force—later renamed the Philippine Mission Mobilization Movement (PM3)—which sought to mobilize 200,000 Filipino tentmakers by 2010, based on their estimates of the Protestant share of overseas Filipinos. That goal was increased to 1 million OFWs making disciples by 2020.
One way to train OFWs was a five-day course called Kairos, a condensed version of the Perspectives course by the US Center for World Missions (now Frontier Ventures). Living Springs International, a ministry started by Max Chismon, a New Zealand missionary to Butuan City, Philippines, developed Kairos in the early 1990s. It was initially offered to church leaders but later spread to lay Christians as well. The organization, now called Simply Mobilizing International, doesn’t know the exact number of Filipino graduates of Kairos but estimates it’s more than 2,000.
Lim stressed a “zero-budget” mission in contrast with the typical Western mission that requires significant financial investment to support the missionary family and operate a church. Instead, he suggested that tentmakers could support themselves, start churches in homes, and train their disciples to start their own churches.
The vision of mobilizing OFWs also took hold among the Filipino diaspora in the ’90s. Sadiri Joy Tira, then pastor of First Filipino Alliance Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, was on a trip to Jordan with leaders of Campus Crusade for Christ, Canada (now Power to Change) when they began to discuss the need to mobilize and disciple Filipinos living in the 10/40 Window.
As he traveled around the Middle East and Asia, he began to see how God was using Filipinos to spread his kingdom. Tira started connecting with like-minded churches and ministries, and together his church and three other partners—Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada (now The Alliance Canada), Campus Crusade, and the Klemke Foundation—created the Filipino International Network (FIN), which sought to “motivate and mobilize Filipinos globally to partner for worldwide mission.”
Together these groups convened prayer meetings, discipleship training seminars, conferences to support families, and gatherings for Filipino leaders. They also distributed the Jesus film in cities around the world.
Tira said that he met Muslims in the Middle East who came to Christ after their Filipino caretakers’ prayers miraculously healed them; Filipina women in Japan who converted their Japanese husbands and their families through their witness; and Filipino factory workers in Taiwan who shared the gospel with Thai and Vietnamese workers they were housed with. In Bahrain, he met OFWs who shared the gospel with their Sri Lankan coworkers, leading to the creation of a Sri Lankan congregation.
In the last few decades, more denominations, mission organizations, and megachurches have joined the movement, spreading the vision of Filipinos bringing the gospel with them to the countries they move to and work in.
Filipino megachurches such as Jesus Is Lord, Victory, Christ’s Commission Fellowship, and Greenhills Christian Fellowship have planted OFW churches in countries all over the world to minister to Filipinos there and equip them to evangelize to the people around them. OFW churches have also made a difference back in the Philippines. For instance, the megachurch Day By Day Jesus Ministries started from a small group of OFWs in Saudi Arabia, led by pastor Ed Lapiz. After returning to the Philippines, Lapiz grew the church to 6,000 people and became well known through his radio program.
Tira, who for 12 years served as Lausanne’s catalyst for diasporas, stresses that it wasn’t the work of one person or even a group of people who started this movement.
“It was the Holy Spirit moving, because what was happening in Saudi Arabia [and] Japan, nobody orchestrated it,” he said. “It just happened.”
Abuses against OFWs
When asked how many OFW tentmakers currently exist—given that it is now four years past the PM3’s 2020 deadline—Lim said that he doesn’t know, as the PMA lacked the funding and manpower to count them. Personally, he said he stopped counting after 5,000. “It’s a faith venture,” he said. “What counts is what we’ll see in heaven.”
Lalano (“Nono”) Badoy, the PMA’s current national director, noted that initially after the creation of PM3, some leaders were too public about their desire to train OFWs, endangering mission groups working with Muslims. In some instances, the eagerness to evangelize has led to imprisonment. In 1998, Saudi Arabian authorities arrested 30 OFWs for sharing their faith and distributing Christian material.
Since then, he said, groups are cautious about sharing numbers, so the PMA doesn’t know how many OFWs are doing this ministry. He estimates that about 10 percent of the 1 million Christian Filipino diaspora serve in their church and that 20 percent have some kind of pastoral role, like leading house churches.
Despite the excitement and promise of OFWs taking the gospel to the nations, OFWs face many challenges and risks because of the nature of their situation as contract workers in foreign countries. OFWs are often subjected to poor working conditions, excessive work, low pay, discrimination, and abuse.
In 2020, the Philippines Overseas Labor Offices documented nearly 24,000 cases of contract violations involving the maltreatment of OFWs. In the Middle East, some are subjected to the kafala or sponsorship system where private citizens or companies have nearly complete control over OFWs’ employment and immigration status.
In 2023, the body of Jullebee Ranara, a Filipina domestic helper in Kuwait, was found in the desert. An autopsy found that Ranara had been impregnated by her employer’s 17-year-old son. He ended up confessing to her murder.
Challenges also arise with spouses and children left behind when OFWs spend most of the year thousands of miles away. Children of OFWs are often vulnerable to drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and school withdrawal, said Rene Bunsoy, manager of partnerships and multimedia at the Global Filipino Movement (GFW). One study found that one in four marriages end when one spouse becomes an OFW.
“I do a lot of exit interviews for those who were repatriated. … Those who were raped, those who were abused—it’s painful to hear them,” Bunsoy said. “But if you ask them, ‘Are you going to still go abroad after all this?’ some of them do.’” GFM works with government agencies, recruitment agencies, and churches to make sure that each prospective OFW knows the risks and challenges before they step on a plane or sign an offer. Illegal recruitment is common, as unscrupulous agents send Filipinos overseas on travel visas and have them work under the table.
GFM also works with OFWs to make financial plans to ensure that separation from their spouses and children is temporary. Together, they discuss the OFW’s goal, whether it’s putting a child through school, buying a house, or paying back a loan, and how much time it’ll take to reach that goal before they come home.
Bunsoy recognizes that he and others can’t prevent people from going abroad, but the group makes them aware of what it entails and provides assistance if they encounter problems in their new countries. The organization also partners with churches and ministries to provide spiritual support to OFWs both before they leave the Philippines and while they are overseas. At the same time, they care for the OFWs’ families back home.
Bunsoy noted that there is a divide in the church. “There are churches who want their members to go abroad because they want to fulfill the Great Commission,” he said. “But if you already know the concerns … if you want to send OFWs abroad, it should be together with their families, with the wife and the children, not the father or the mother only.”
Reaching Kuwait’s domestic workers
Each year, an average of 172,000 Filipina women move abroad to work as domestic workers. They face the greater challenges compared to other OFWs, as they often have little time off and are unable to leave their employers’ homes. They are a mission field themselves.
Anson Dionisio, an OFW in Kuwait who works as a graphic designer while pastoring a virtual church connected to Filipino Language Christian Congregation (FLCC), has seen these issues crop up with the household workers he ministers to. Many women who attend the church’s virtual Bible studies say they struggle with depression and anxiety due to their isolation, separation from their children, or unkind and abusive employers.
Marriages are frequently rocky due to the months or years wives spend away from their husbands. Some keep boyfriends in Kuwait or find out that their husbands back home are having affairs. They worry about their children growing up and dealing with life without their mothers.
To help these women, Dionisio started providing online counseling sessions with church leaders at all hours, even if the women had free time only late in the evening after finishing work.
Dionisio and others at their OFW church—most of whom work in white-collar jobs—had historically struggled to find a way to reach this population. A decade ago, church members would walk around the giant villas in the city praying for the live-in Filipina domestic helpers they couldn’t see.
Last year, when Dionisio took up the position of digital pastor, the doors finally opened. Using his graphic design background, Dionisio started creating social media posts to advertise their new online Bible study. At first, he used English to target everyone—professionals, students, and domestic workers. About 45 people showed up to the congregation’s first Bible study held in June 2023.
Then in October, he felt God call him to create a post targeting domestic workers. He initially thought to use an image of a woman cleaning, but a member of his team who worked in the profession explained that the image was offensive as it reduced these women to their jobs. So instead, he used a photo of an OFW at the airport heading abroad. In Tagalog, he wrote, “Are you an OFW here in Kuwait? Do you know that God loves you?” In the caption, he invited viewers to join the Bible study.
By boosting his Facebook post and targeting domestic workers in Kuwait, hundreds of comments and messages started pouring in.
“I was so surprised. It was overwhelming,” Dionisio recalled. “We couldn’t believe all the Filipinas who were asking, ‘Where is this church? We’ve been praying for this.’ We were not prepared.”
The virtual church grew from hosting a Sunday Bible study to adding Wednesday night groups at 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. to work with the women’s schedules. Today, the virtual church has seven discipleship groups. A total of about 300 domestic workers joined the meetings—not only from Kuwait but also from Bahrain, Qatar, and other Gulf states. Dionisio’s team identified and trained leaders from among the domestic workers to lead the groups.
“I’m amazed at how active [the domestic workers] are after 15 hours of working,” Dionisio said. “They start work at 6 a.m., and the Bible study is at 10 or 11 p.m. You see how energetic they are. Some of them are listening in while ironing clothes or taking care of their employer’s baby.”
Dionisio noted that he and his ministry team were not prepared for the toll the ministry would take on them physically and emotionally. Often they are up until 1 a.m. for prayer meetings or Bible studies but then need to wake up at 6 a.m. for work. Yet despite the lack of sleep, their conviction leads them to continue.
“I can testify that a lot of the ministry workers have found fulfillment in this ministry that they’ve never felt before, because right now they see with their own two eyes lives being changed, families being saved.”
Ministry to OFWs vs. locals
Over in Dubai, Marianna Garcia Bucud, administrative pastor of Sharjah United Methodist Church, is also consumed by a taxing schedule: Monday through Friday, she works as an instructional assistant at an American school in Dubai while her husband works at a telecom company.
On top of that, they hold Monday night Bible studies with OFWs, Tuesday night fellowship for Filipino teachers and faculty, and Thursday night worship services for Filipino mall workers. On Fridays, they drive two hours each way to hold Friday night fellowship from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. for a group of OFWs working at hair salons, not arriving home until 3 a.m. Over the weekend, their church holds Sunday services, which her husband facilitates as the lead pastor.
Bucud admits it’s a struggle to manage everything, especially with three children—two in their 20s and one in elementary school—all while taking online seminary courses. The children have gotten used to missing out on family hangouts on the weekends and joining their parents in church activities. “We’re so happy to serve these people because they are enthusiastic and they’re very serious in their faith,” Bucud said. “They hunger for God’s Word. So, who am I to not go there?”
Like Dionisio, Bucud’s ministry is focused on other OFWs rather than the local population. Yet she desires to reach her physical neighbors as well. On the weekends, Bucud and others from her church go out to evangelize at the malls where people of all backgrounds congregate. Due to restrictions on proselytizing in the UAE, they always first ask the passersby about their religion, talk to them casually, and see if it’s appropriate to share about Jesus or pass out a tract.
“[UAE] is really diverse, and sometimes it’s challenging to penetrate into their situation and their lives,” Bucud said. “I think as missionary workers, we need to innovate ourselves to deal with this kind of situation.” She thinks that she and other OFW ministry workers need traditional missionaries to train them how to do cross-cultural missions as well as help them learn the local languages to connect with people. “If we just focus more on the Filipino culture base, I think the progress would be really slow.”
Reaching out to fellow Filipinos is often the default of OFW tentmakers, as they already understand the culture and language. Loneliness and the challenges of living overseas can drive OFWs toward faith in a way that may not have happened if they had remained in the Philippines.
Badoy, who also cofounded the GFM, noted that often denominations and mission groups will reach Filipinos rather than unreached people groups because it’s easier. Funding is dependent on the number of converts, so there is an additional incentive to focus on fellow OFWs.
Badoy believes there is a need to recast the vision of OFWs tentmakers: “You are not just there for Filipinos, but you’re there for the nations. Part of the vision should really be Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists. … They should be one of the special focuses of the ministry.” He noted that some OFWs who initially left the Philippines with the goal of making disciples have instead become focused on making money.
In the past, Badoy said that he heard many stories of non-Christians coming to Christ. But recently when he asked leaders to give stories of a few people who were coming to Christ from a Buddhist background, they couldn’t find any.
“We’re praying that there would be more [people] who would respond to the challenge. … We have to always remind them that the scattering of Filipinos is God’s way of using Filipinos to be a blessing.”
In general, the PMA now takes a more supportive role in mobilizing OFW tentmakers since denominations are involved in training and commissioning their own OFW members. They share best practices, discuss challenges, and provide some training to mission directors but leave the denominations to do the work of directly overseeing, sending, and providing missionary care to OFW tentmakers.
For instance, the Church of the Nazarene created the SENT program, which ministers to around 200 OFWs online and in person. This year, they’ve also started online courses—made up of videos, journals, practical assignments, and one-on-one meetings with SENT leaders —to help OFWs start small groups in their homes. Completing the 12 courses counts toward ordination.
The group is also working to get their denomination to recognize OFW tentmakers as missionaries. A SENT leader, who herself is an OFW in Vietnam, said that she often hears OFWs tell her, “I cannot go out, but I pray for my employer. While I was mopping the floor, I was praying for all of this house.” The leader, who asked not to be named for security reasons, stresses that this is no small feat; their prayers are making a difference. She tells them, “You’re the only person who can get into that house—not me, not a pastor, not a missionary, but you.”
Sometimes the blessings return to the Philippines. One woman whom the SENT leader had mentored before leaving the Philippines and visited in the UAE ended up moving back to her home in Masbate, Philippines. She started the city’s first Nazarene church in her home. SENT’s chaplaincy program also worked with her children, who had gotten involved in drugs and prostitution, and they have since come to Christ and are now helping their mother with the church.
Back in Kuwait, Dionisio said that after gathering virtually for about half a year, members of his congregation finally had a chance to meet face-to-face at the church’s Christmas party, as their employers gave them the holiday off.
It was an unforgettable night, Dionisio recalled.
“Everyone was just crying. They couldn’t believe that they had found this spiritual family.” Many women expressed that as household workers, they never expected to be heading up a Bible study, leading singing, or exhorting the Word of God. “It was far from their wildest dream.”
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