July-August 2022 Newsletter

The Cycles of Life

Everything needs a start and it needs a finish. Everyone needs a time of celebration and a time of hard work. Ministry runs the same way. Things just can´t go on and on, we need to reach goals. In the last week of June, we finished another semester at our Bible School. We run two semesters a year, one from the end of January through the end of June. The second starts in August and runs through the middle of December. Hopefully this December we will be graduating 8-9 students that will have finished our 6-semester (three-year) program. One of those students is our daughter Vanessa who aside from studying at the bible school is also in university doing her fourth year of business administration. Two weeks after finishing our Bible school we also held the closing ceremonies for our primary and secondary school. Since we are registered with the Mexican national school board, we are having to use their school schedule, but we are permitted to not teach from their textbooks if necessary. This next school year we are looking to replace several textbooks since Mexico is promoting gender ideology in all the schools. This teaching is totally contrary to what the Word of God teaches us. Also, pray with us as we look for a new principal for the school since our present principal got married in May and will be moving out of the area. Aside from the academic requisites, we are also needing someone that is a strong Christian. Over 80% of our students are not Christian nor do they come from Christian homes.

In the month of June, both of us have our birthdays (Vanessa also celebrates her birthday one day before her dad). Since both of our birthdays were on service nights, the churches decided to give us a time of celebration which we enjoyed together with all our brothers and sisters in the Lord. We also held our Xalisco church anniversary number 34 on the 11th of June. Thirty-four years ago, we were just a home group. We have been persistent and through the years the Xalisco church has grown to be 11 churches and missions in our area of the State of Nayarit. There are also many other members that left the church but continued serving God and some even planted churches only without our covering. As the name of our ministry out of Genesis 8 states, “While the earth remains, Seedtime and harvest, ….Shall not cease.”

As we look forward to the next couple of weeks, we have two weddings programmed before the month ends. Also, on July 30th we are hosting, along with the State Pastoral Alliance of which Philip is the Chairman, a Pastor and leadership conference. We are expecting between 150-200 attendees. Aside from the fellowship, we will have 4 great speakers that will be teaching on leadership in the church. On the 1st of August, a group of 14 youth leave under the guidance of Agustin and Damara for an 8-day mission trip. On the 13th we start a new semester in the Bible school and by the end of the month, we will have all 3 schools back in class. There are a lot more activities that are planned to take place in the next two months but all of them are just help for the local churches. The strength of any ministry is the churchgoers. If there was no church, there is no body, and without His body, Christ would not be preached.

Thank you church for standing alongside us as we endeavour to fulfill the calling the Lord Jesus Christ has put on our lives. Also, we still need 300 people that are willing to give $250 each to invest in the property that we need to finish paying off for the church of Agustin and Damara in Tepic. Please help us make this church a reality so that it can continue to grow and plant more churches.

We pray that the blessings of our Lord Jesus Christ will be upon you. your families, and your homes. We have so much to be thankful for.




Philip, Lucy, & Vanessa Tolman

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