© 2023 Eugene Asidao
© 2023 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
by Eugene Asidao 11/14/22
It was a very active ministry, with a busy schedule during the three months we met with readers and potential readers.
¶ DISTRIBUTION OF THE BOOK.
Urantia Foundation has allocated us a number of Books which we have been able to give to individuals, public and private libraries in schools, colleges and universities with success.
¶ OUR FIRST TRIP AFTER COVID
On August 11, the first thing we did after nearly three years of absence was to meet with the most active and trusted readers with whom we had relationships to study the situation of the Urantia community in the Philippines.
Our next visit was to northern Negros Occidental, where our contact helped us donate books to colleges, universities and other higher education institutions for two days straight.
Through our contact in Bacolod City, we rented a vehicle to speed up the distribution and thirteen schools received Urantia Books. It was a good experience with many contacts
Then, back at our base in Bacolod City, we spoke to two key individual contacts to schedule a study meeting with them and follow up with their individual contacts.
Our contact Danny then arranged a home meeting with food preparation, which is usually the norm for meeting people. Dinner is part of the socialization and then we had the formal meeting which started with questions and answers for the new recruits.
After the first meeting, study sessions were held with the new recruits to fuel their interest in reading the book.
We also visited 2 contact groups in Iloilo area. Then we came back to Bacolod City for 3 weeks for follow-up study meetings.
The possibility of giving the book in the multiple provinces of the island of Panay is also being considered in the coming years.
After a few days in Metro Manila, we went to Puerto Princesa City on Palawan Island to meet and chat with our contacts. They accompanied us to donate books to public libraries, colleges and universities. One university even asked for 17 additional books to give to each of their 17 departments. We sent them when we returned from Manila, as we could not carry them due to weight restrictions.
Then we went to the Bicol region, to meet a couple of readers who have some influence on their families and friends. The bus ride took us more than 14 hours just to get there. It was still dark when we arrived at the bus station and we had to wait for our contact in the dark. Luckily, a person from Barrio or Barangay saw us and asked us who we wanted to meet and with a friendly gesture accompanied us to our contact’s house. Our contact was sleeping and we had to wake him up. During the day, we had a very fruitful exchange of ideas and then our group meeting with the 4 people was very fraternal. Since this place is isolated, buses can only pass once a day and the jeepneys (a local means of transport) are usually full of agricultural products to be traded to the market in the main city of Naga. We have to make do with a tricycle (small motorcycle driven by a sidecar carrying 2 to 4 people) to go to Naga city which takes three hours.
We stayed in Naga City for a day to rest, then it took us 12 hours of transportation to reach Quezon City. From the bus station, we took a taxi back home late in the evening.
¶ TEACHING PROCESS, CONSULTATION, RECRUITMENT, MONITORING AND EXPANSION
After returning to our base in Metro Manila and after a few days of rest we were able to meet with people we had not seen for almost three years. We also tried to start a dialogue with people who needed clarification on the state of the Urantia movement in the Philippines.
In between site visits, we consulted with key individuals. We also attended face-to-face study groups, mainly in Pasig City (4 times) and Antipolo City.
We also held weekly group meetings through zoom to connect readers all over the Philippines and 4 times a week meetings with the translation team who translate the texts into Tagalog. (The most spoken language in the Philippines).
Sometimes when we were in a city doing ministry work, we would join study group meetings and translation team via zoom when the hotel internet was strong enough.
The teachings of the book must be coupled with our relationship with individuals so that we can gain personal experience. If members see the benefit the teachings bring to them on the levels of body, mind, and soul, they will certainly be active and spread the teachings.
The Philippines and East Timor are the only countries in Asia to have a majority Christian population (90%) and more particularly Catholic.
110 million inhabitants The Philippines is a country in Southeast Asia consisting of an archipelago of 7,107 islands bordering the western fringe of the Pacific Ocean. Only about 2,000 islands are inhabited. It shares maritime borders with Malaysia to the west, Indonesia to the south and Taiwan to the north.
It is the last country to join the restricted club of countries with more than 100 million inhabitants, a mark it reached on July 27, 2014. It is even expected that the country will have 142 million inhabitants in 2045. A figure that slows down the progress of the fight against poverty in the country. Thanks to economic growth, many Filipinos are indeed emerging from poverty and extreme poverty. In 2018, 16.7% of inhabitants live in poverty (-$2 per day), compared to 21.6% in 2015 and 26.6% in 2006. Progress that could be faster but which exists nonetheless.
Personal relationships, helping one another (called Bayanihan in Filipino/Tagalog) in all aspects of life and a vision for the well-being of the planet are what give us the spiritual fuel to have the stamina to continue our ministry. In a third world country like the Philippines, we pay great attention to material needs as well as intellectual and spiritual human needs.
The process we usually use with key people is to give them guidance and direction or vision to gather new contacts and help them find ways to introduce The Urantia Book to the most interested people who will eventually become regular members. We have come to understand that building the Urantia movement requires patience and careful work. We must build the core of leaders and animators with broad membership.
In the region of the Philippines we went to, we met 2 contact groups in Iloilo province and its capital Iloilo City, in the cities of Negros Occidental and Bacolod City (we went back twice) with two study group meetings and contacts in the Bicol region with one group meeting, Palawan and Metro Manila. We also met people and a few groups in different parts of Luzon, mainly in Quezon province, Las Pinas, Binangi and in southern Indonesia, in Binangonan town in Rizal province, Antipolo City, Quezon City, Paranaque City and Pasig City.
We also have some contacts in 3 different provinces on the big island of Mindanao but we are saving that for our next big ministry due to time constraints. There are other island provinces that we need to attend to. There is also a large area of northern and central Luzon that we will need to explore as well. We intend to return to minister twice a year in 2023 and later regularly if we are to expand nationally.
¶ APPRECIATION AND FUTURE PROSPECTS
We greatly appreciate the help of the Fellowship and the Urantia Books donated by Urantia Foundation. Furthermore, we have given much of our material, financial, intellectual and spiritual energies during this journey. Truly, if the Urantia movement works as a team, we can do great things.
This year 2022 is our ninth year of ministry in the Philippines. However, the ministry we have done in the past three months is, in our opinion, a great success. It bears the fruit of the seed we have planted, year after year. It has given us a glimpse of what is possible to develop in the coming years.
We need to solidify these contacts in 2023. Our vision is to multiply groups all over the Philippines, while developing grassroots leadership at the national level.
This is our next major goal in the next 5, 10 and more years.
¶ TAGALOG TRANSLATION
In 2020, we signed a contract with Urantia Foundation to translate the book into Tagalog and we receive financial support that allows us to devote a lot of time to the translation. The team meets for 4 hours, three times a week. As I write this, we have already completed the first part and the team is on the second part and has completed Paper 41. We are targeting the year 2030 to complete the entire Urantia Book and hope to have it printed by then. If it is printed in the national language, more Filipinos of all classes will be attracted to reading. The study group we are currently leading will then be composed of mature readers and will therefore be able to absorb and lead other study groups.
¶ A FEW WORDS ABOUT EUGENE ASIDAO
I found The Urantia Book about 40 years ago at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Chicago. However, I did not fully read The Urantia Book until about 14 years ago, in 2009. In my youth, even before seriously reading The Urantia Book, I was a religious person drawn to Western philosophy. I studied spiritual and esoteric teachings. After consulting all the books and teachers of Eastern and Western esoteric teachings, I focused on The Urantia Book.
Thus, I discovered that the book had much more to offer, being the most comprehensive, the most logical, the most grounded and the most realistic in my eyes. It took me some time to digest its contents. Later, my wife and I joined the Chicago study group which was held on Tuesdays and Sundays.
