March-April 2022 Newsletter

Taking the Land

If we are going to take our place in the promises that God has given us, we need two things. First, we need the Lord to be our captain. Just as Joshua bowed down before the Captain of the Lord before crossing the Jordan, we need to bow down and recognize God as our captain. Secondly, we need to have a plan and do things according to the plan. For every work that needs to be done God has a plan and we need to make that plan ours. Here in our mission field, we have a plan, and we know that the plan is from God. The church is not about numbers, as Jesus Christ will place us in the exact spot we need to be. Salvation is about numbers. God doesn’t want anyone to perish but that all can come to the knowledge of Christ. That talks about numbers.

SAMAO 2040 is a project that we started in October 2020 in part of one township in our State. In the 18 months that we have been running the plan, we have now signed up 15 families that we are meeting with every month. To be eligible to sign up for the program there must be a baby born into the household.

The basic plan is to help the family to raise that child for the next 20 years giving them orientation in 5 areas of their lives. This includes social, financial, health, education, and most important religion.

A second project that we just started in February is a plan to place a Bible in every home in our city in the next 5 years. In February we started with the first 23 blocks in the subdivision around one of our churches. We are not doing this alone as there are over 20 other pastors working on the project with us (Philip is

currently chairman of the city Pastor´s Alliance). We are using a version of the Bible that is called the fisherman’s Bible that has study notes to help a person who doesn’t know how to use a Bible, an easy way to learn. Our city with its suburbs has close to 400,000 inhabitants and just over 50,000 homes. If 40% of these homes do not have a Bible, we will need 20,000 Bibles over the next 5 years, or in dollars, just over $100,000. God is our supplier.

At the end of January, we started a new semester at our Bible school that will run through the end of June. We have 11 students in our second-year class and 6 in our first-year class. It is an honour to be able to teach the Word, but it is not only the Word but a lifestyle. In the second year, we teach biblical finances which not only teaches what the Bibles says about money but also how to run your daily expenses. Another class that we teach is Spanish. Grammar, word use, and spelling are all part of sharing the Word of God.

The last Saturday in February we had an outdoor church get-together of our churches that are close to Tepic. With just under 200 people in attendance, we had an excellent time of worship, the Word and fellowship. Every year we try to have at least one of these fellowship meetings to help create unity between the pastors and the churches. It is easy to get locked into your local church activities and forget that God´s church is a lot bigger than one local assembly.

We pray that the blessings of our Lord Jesus Christ will be upon your families and your homes. We have so much to be thankful for. Please keep in your prayers our upcoming youth and family camp during Easter week. We take 6 days to go up into the mountains to camp and we disconnect for everything but God. No electricity, telephones, internet or running water. In the over 30 years that we have been doing this, one thing is sure, the presence of God is always there in a powerful way.


Philip, Lucy, & Vanessa Tolman

January-February 2022 Newsletter

Planting In Good Ground

Planting a crop is very hard work. If the field is not properly prepared before planting your work will be doubled. We have a small ranch of about 600 fruit trees and we have learned the importance of looking for good ground. In the church the same concept is true. We can spend all of our time planting seed on the path or among the thorns and we will never have a harvest. We need to look for good ground to get our returns. In 2021 we spent a year preparing the churches and planting the Word outside of the church. This year the Lord has opened the door for us to have an abundant harvest and see all of our churches grow.

As we mentioned in our last Newsletter we felt that it was time for the churches to start doing aggressive evangelism. In December we started with a 3-day evangelistic crusade in the main park of the city of Tepic. For the last 2 years, we had only been having church inside our 4 walls or in homes. During the crusade, we saw real miracles of healings and bodies being restored. More than the miracles it was a place of breaking fears that were holding down many people in the church. There were a lot of people that came back the next day bringing people that needed a healing touch on their bodies. More than anything the name of Jesus was glorified. The last day of the crusade was Sunday the 19th and we cancelled our church service and almost everyone from the church came out to attend the crusade.

At the end of January, we will be starting a new semester at our Bible school. In the month of February, we will be starting with our Bible outreach and doing evangelism with the Jesus film.

In the last part of 2021, we finished the year with a Youth Conference in San Pedro with Stephen & Marcela. We sent a busload of young people (with their chaperones) and they were blessed. Each person that went came back motivated to continue on with their walk with God. We also had our church Christmas Posadas (this is more than just a Christmas party) where the church family gets together to celebrate the birth of Jesus and do activities that represent the Virgin Birth of our Savior. There is a lot more that we could talk about, but I want to share a short story of one of our converts.

I will call him Pancho. About 23 years ago Pancho was sent to one of our churches by his leaders, who were Satanists, to destroy the church. He was not able to do what he was sent to do but before he left he had heard enough of the Word that it stayed with him. We fast forward 18 years and Pacho comes back to the church accompanied by his wife and 3 of his children. He has left the coven and he is now a born-again Christian along with his wife, his parents and part of his wife’s family. I will not go into the details of the struggle he went through to be free of the demonic activity in his life but even today he still is in constant warfare. What I want to mention is that Pancho and his wife are now starting their 5th semester in our Bible school. They both have ministries in the church and are helping us with one of our church missions. These are lives that have been transformed through being born again.

We pray that the blessings of our Lord Jesus Christ will be upon your families and your homes. We have so much to be thankful for. If God lays on your heart to help in the upcoming projects we have please do so, We have students to sponsor, Bibles to give away as well as our own personal expenses to cover as we work with the churches here. Also if someone wants to come and teach English as a ministry for 3 to 6 months we have an opening for you.




Philip, Lucy, & Vanessa Tolman

November-December 2021 Newsletter

For Everything There Is A Time

We have God’s promises and God’s timing. When we move in God’s timing His promises will always be
fulfilled. In our weekly church services, we now have our auditoriums filled to capacity. We have most of the members back in services and they have a hunger for the Word of God. A virtual church does not function as a church. We still film our virtual services but for the body to be able to minister to its self we have to be together. Along with the crowds we also have new believers that once again are coming into the churches. In November we had 2 baptism services with a total of 11 being baptized, The church needs to continue to grow as it moves forward.

The second weekend of November the pastor’s wives organized a Women’s conference in Tepic. We had over 300 women in attendance but more than the attendance was the fact that over 15 churches in the city participated. Together with the conference we also held a children’s day so that the mothers could attend the conference. Agustin and Damara organized the children's activity while Lucy was one of the organizers of the conference. This is the third women’s conference that we have helped organize and each one has been a blessing to the women that attend.

At the end of August, we started our school year in our Christian schools. Enrollment was down at the beginning even though our students were back in the classroom. As the school year progressed we had more students come and now our primary school has close to 20 students while in our secondary school, we are still struggling with enrollment. All of our students at this level are boys and most with low academic achievement. This is part of our ministry to them. Only 2 all of our students come from Christian homes so our daily devotionals reach a very open group.

In our leaders' meeting in the month of September, we felt that it was time for the churches to start doing aggressive evangelism. At that time we had no special plan but we wrote down where we needed to go as we prayed to God for a plan to reach the lost. Since then the Lord has literally dropped on our laps a whole outreach program that has come from different sources. We start in December with a 3-day outdoor evangelistic campaign along with 30 other pastors from our area. In January we will systematically start to place a bible in each home of the city of Tepic and also in the surrounding towns. In 5 years our plan is to give away 40,000 Bibles which the churches here will be paying for. We have also recontacted with the Jesus Film Project (we worked with them in 2001 and did over 1,500 projections in one month State-wide). They now have over 150 movies, videos and video clips in Spanish to use in small groups for evangelism. The year 2022 is going to be very busy.

At this time of Thanksgiving and the coming Christmas season, we pray that the blessings of our Lord Jesus Christ will be upon your families and your homes. We have so much to be thankful for. Just with the birth of the Son of God to bring salvation would be more than enough but aside from that, we have been blessed with abundance. As you get ready to give this season, if God lays on your heart to help in the upcoming projects we have please do so, We have students to sponsor, Bibles to give away as well as our own personal expenses to cover as we work with the churches here. Also if someone wants to come and teach English as a ministry for 3 to 6 months we have an opening for you.

We bless you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.


Philip, Lucy, & Vanessa Tolman

September-October 2021 Newsletter

 Here Comes the Rain

                                                

In the natural this last year was a time of drought in our area. When the rains finally came they were a welcomed relief. On the spiritual side the church also went through a drought. With limitations on the number of people that could attend, sick people staying home for a month or more and the social distancing our church family became distracted. There were very few small prayer groups nor was there the opportunity to put your arm around someone to pray with them. In this time of drought the weaker Christians lost their direction and even some of the stronger ones started to stumble. In the last few weeks we have seen a sovereign flow of the Holy Spirit once more in the church. There is a new hunger for God`s presence and a waning of the fear that had held many people captive. The spiritual rain of the Spirit of God is starting to revive His church.

July was a time of of accepting that we live in this world with the same risk factors as everyone else. The major difference is that we have God on our side. Philip travelled to the States for a missions conference and when he returned home he found the house infected with COVID. All our children along with our son and daughter in law came through fine but we missed some weeks of work and ministry. For other of our fellow ministers, God had other plans as He took home with Him one pastor and the wife of another pastor in our fellowship.

August was the start of a new school year in both our Bible school and our Christian schools. The 14th of August was the start of a new semester for our Bible school students as we started with 18 students. This semester we started a second year class. Since we are only holding classes on Saturdays, one year of study takes a 18 months.

The last Monday of the month we started a new school year in our Christian schools. Enrollment was down this year after having classes on line for a year and a half. Now our students are back in the classroom even though they still have some classes on line. The best part of being back in the classroom is that we can once again start each day with a devotional and prayer. With classes on line that just didn’t have the same effectiveness as being with the students face to face.

Just two days before classes started we were hit unexpectedly with the cyclone Nora. The storm was tracked to stay out at sea but it decided to turn inland and we got the backlash of 10 hours of wind and rain. All the damage done was material. Our first day of school was done without electricity and it took 3 people 5 work days just to clean up the front part of our property. Between our banana trees, bamboo and other fruit trees there was a lot to clean up. Our house had to have part of the roof tiles replaced and the school also had roof damage. The main area is now clean and the rest of the property we can clean up at a more leisurely pace.

Thank you, each of you, who have partnered with us in finance and prayers. We bless you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Philip, Lucy, & Vanessa Tolman

July-August 2021 Newsletter

The Hand to the Plow

Summer has come and with it our rainy season. What a relief! We finished our driest year in over 40 years that I have lived here in Mexico. The rainy season means the start of a lot of outside work. Our State is mainly agricultural and a lot of the planting depends on the rains. The same concept also works in the spiritual realm. When the rains of the Holy Spirit start to fall it is time to get out into the fields and work for the harvest. As long as there is spiritual dryness in the land there will not be much of a harvest.

In the town of the “Ahualamo” we continue with our weddings. In June we had the third wedding of the year and we still have 2 more to go. We also had another wedding in our Xalisco Church in the month of July. 2021 has turned out to be a year of weddings. All of these weddings are couples that have been living together and they are working on making their covenant right before God. It is great to see how the Holy Spirit brings conviction on our lives to make us change. This is part of the walk of faith that makes our life so interesting. The world wants us to adapt to their way of thinking and to be more open minded. God is not closed minded. He just never changes. A marriage between one man and one woman is the only marriage covenant that is blessed by God.

Baby Dedication

Our Christian school Xecora finished its 21st school year this month of July. We finally were able to get the students back into the classrooms for the last 3 weeks of school. Throughout the whole school year we held classes but not with all the students present. Each student of our primary school would come in two mornings a week and do the rest of their classes on line. With our secondary school students we would have them in classes one week a month (5 days) even though being at school, they had some classes online since not all the teachers could come in. We start classes for our next school year on August 30th. Please pray with us that we can double our enrolment this year and also that we will be permitted to have the students in regular classes.

Our social outreach project that we had written about last year got a little bogged down this year with the pandemic but starting the month of July we have positioned our staff once again to continue working on the project. It is a long term project that we call SAMAO 2040 as we plan it to run 20 years or more. As a short term result of the plan we have 3 new families coming to the local church in the township where we are running the plan. With each baby that is born on the area we have designated for the plan, we offer the family to sign up to be part of it. For each family that signs up we will walk along side of that family in both the spiritual and social aspects of their lives until their child turns 20 years old. We are looking not only at getting people saved but we also want to see families transformed and bad cultural habits broken. It is one of our ways of making disciples.

One of the pictures is a new baby that was signed into the plan by her parents along with Fernando who heads up the project. The other is the presentation of 3 children in the church of a family that is now attending services as a result of the plan.

Thank you, each of you, who have partnered with us in finance and prayers. We bless you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.



Philip, Lucy, & Vanessa Tolman

May-June 2021 Newsletter

    Camp and More

As we wrote in our last newsletter in March, we were making preparations for our annual youth and family camp. Our youth camp runs 6 days and the family camp joins in the last 3 days. In 2020 we almost had to cancel our camp because of the pandemic restrictions, but God gave us favor and we were able to have it. This year we decided to use an area that was more secluded and absent of all communications. We found an orchard on the side of our local volcano and opened up registrations to a limited number of churches.

 Our camps usually run between 80-100 people including staff. The camps are very extreme as far as living conditions are concerned. Three weeks before camp stared this year we had 140 people registered and we had to close registrations. We easily could have doubled the number of campers  but the physical limitations wouldn’t let us have more campers. With staff and some people that just showed up we had just over 170 registered campers. We had a powerful time and God´s presence was overwhelming. To see over 100 youth laid out basking in God´s presence is something to experience. The theme of the camp was “Connect yourself” (to God) and that is what happened. These types of encounters stay with you all your life. Once you have felt God´s presence move you, you will never be the same.

In the town of the “Ahualamo” we continue with our weddings. In April we had the second wedding and we still have 3 more to go. The third couple had their civil wedding in April and the church ceremony will be in June. As we mentioned previously, the Mexican government does not recognize the validity of a church wedding and thus each couple has to have a civil wedding before they have a church wedding.

In the churches we are are back to normal services. Social distancing and face masks are a thing of the past. In most of the churches we have seen an increase in church attendance and in all the centers we have new people coming in to hear the salvation message. We have been able to reduce the number of services that we have a week now that we can fill the churches. This takes some of the extra load off of the ministry team and lets us have more time for counseling and visitation.  

The first of May, which is a national holiday here, we had a church get together of the churches that we give spiritual covering to in our State. We have 5 churches in the city of Tepic and 7 churches and missions in the surrounding towns. We held the gathering at our school facilities where we set up an outdoor auditorium. Over 200 people from 9 of the 12 churches were able to attend and we enjoyed a time of fellowship and of the Word. As is the case here in Mexico, the lack of transportation limits the ability of many people to attend.

Thank you, each of you, who have partnered with us in finance and prayers. We bless you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Philip, Lucy, & Vanessa Tolman

March-April 2021 Newsletter

    Life is back to the new “normal”as we have adapted to ministry in our new world order. After spending over a year in Mexico without leaving the country we are now back into ministry in and out of México. In January Philip was blessed to be able to attend a missions conference in Montana and in February Philip & Lucy were able to take advantage of a plane ticket that had been cancelled in 2020 to make another ministry trip. On this last trip they both had to be tested for COVID 19 before being able to enter the USA, which is now something we have to learn to live with. Since these trips Philip has also ministered in 3 different States of Mexico as the church continues forward.

In the month of February our State had an outbreak of COVID 19 and we had to limit our meetings to 30% of our capacity in our main churches. Instead of stopping services we programmed more services and had the church members sign up for the service they wanted to attend. In the churches in the small towns we had no problems and our church services continued as always. The only event that we had to postpone was a church get together that we had programmed in the month of February. Lord willing we will be holding it on the 1st of May. 

The picture is of Lucy participating in one of our ladies monthly activities in the Xalisco church. Our Bible School started a new semester of classes the end of January and we have in-classroom classes every week. The only part of our ministry that is not back to normal activities are our Christian schools. In the primary school the students come in for classes two day a week so that we don’t have a conglomeration of students together at the school at one time. Our secondary school, since it is small, comes in for classes every other week.

Last year, in the church we pastor in the town of the “Ahualamo”, we discovered that we had 5 couples in the church that were not married. In the smaller towns this is very common since getting married in Mexico is not easy. The bureaucracy will make you take at least 3 days of your time before you can get married. This is all because of the blood tests, the mandatory pre-nuptial talks and the certificate of not being previously married that needs to be issued from the township where you were born. All of this has to be done in the main city of the township that can be an hour or two away. Since we believe that marriage in necessary we have started helping each of these couples to get married with both a civil and a church wedding. In Mexico church weddings are not legitimate according to the laws of the land. On the 19th of February the first couple was married and we now have the next two weddings programmed, one in April and the other in May. Hopefully by September we will have all 5 couples married.

After 40 years of having the same Post Box we have had to close it. Our Post office was closed so our PO box was no longer available. Where we live there is no mail service. Because of this we ask for all mail to be sent only to our US address that is posted on the top of this page. Most of our communications are digital so this change will not affect most of you. Any letter that you mail to us will be digitalized and forwarded on to us. All the checks you send will be deposited into our account so that we can access them online. Change is not always easy but it is very necessary.

As we look forward to the month of April we will be holding our annual youth and family camp Easter week. This year we had to close camp inscriptions three weeks before camp starts, something we have never had to do. Our camp capacity this year is for 120 campers and when we closed inscriptions we had 170 people signed up for camp. Something special is moving in the hearts of the people.

Thank you, each of you, who have partnered with us in finance and prayers. We bless you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.


Philip, Lucy, & Vanessa Tolman