SALVATION AND MINISTRY TESTIMONY

 

I felt led to the ministry at an early age. I grew up in a family with strong Protestant roots, practically growing in Sunday school. But I did not get to know the Lord in a personal way until I got into college. One fateful evening on my first year in college, by the prodding of the Lord (the lamp in my room kept blinking on and off so I could not study); I attended an evangelistic crusade in my church conducted by Evangelist Greg Tingson. I was gloriously saved that night and by impulse decided I would become an evangelist like Rev. Tingson.

 

But I was not to be - not yet, anyway. The ensuing years were turbulent ones. While the gift of evangelism immediately manifested itself, many times powerfully, I was not ready then to pursue the separated life required of a servant of God. In fact, quite the contrary happened. If there was a carnal Christian, I was it. For many years following my conversion, I lived a life of religious hypocrisy. I would serve the Lord one moment, often with tremendous results, and live like a son of the devil himself the next.

 

But God would not let go of me. Even during those years of sin and darkness the Shepherd of my soul showed me His love, compassion and deep concern. In my biggest crisis He gave me a miracle. While driving up to Baguio City one day in 1992 I figured in a freak accident on a highway. I ran over a 5-years old girl twice in her mid-section, killing her in the process. But God in His marvelous love and mercy performed a miracle in response to my desperate cry for help: He raised the dead child to life before my very eyes! (This account has been blessing many churches since and has been published in two national magazines in the Philippines).

 

The event was the pivotal point in my life. It finally dawned upon me that the God who saved me had been calling me into full-time ministry all along. My response, though very much delayed, was decisive this time.

 

I was eventually ordained a minister of the Gospel in 1996 by both the Jesus Lord Almighty Church and the Kingsway Fellowship International. I received another ordination from the Fil-Kor Int’l. Gospel Mission where I served as an evangelist until my coming to the United States. One of my biggest thrills in ministry was to find myself working with the man who brought me to Christ in 1960, Dr. Greg Tingson. We both served with the League of Philippine Evangelists and the Centennial Gospel Team of the Philippines from 1997 to 2000.

 

It has been a long and tortuous road to ministry but when I said yes to the Lord, He immediately opened doors as if to tell me to make up for lost time. My last crusade in the Philippines yielded about a thousand souls in one service. The taxi driver who brought me to the airport became a new man in Christ before we reached the airport. And it was his birthday that day!

 

God brought me and my wife to America in October 2000 and in less than a year, I was ordained as a minister by a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn. An ugly turn of events (looking back, now, it was part of God’s ordering of my steps) compelled me to leave the church. The following one and a half years, perceived by some to become a long winter of morose discontent for me, became instead a God-ordained season of glad planting and harvest. I was able to finish my doctorate in Theology and at the same time plant an ongoing church in Jersey City. After a year, I left the care of the church in the hands of a capable elder to answer a call to pastor a church in New York for two years.

 

What I would consider as a linchpin of my ministry in the U.S is the Heal Our Land Prayer Movement for the Nations which the Lord burdened me to start in 2005 as a prayer rally for the Philippines. Now, it has become a monthly prayer gathering involving more than 40 Churches in the New York/New Jersey areas.

 

In 2008, I established Citigates Church New York which I pastored until we came to the Philippines to organize Citigates Philippines International Ministries. In just a few months we were able to gather more than 250 churches to join Citigates with many pastors getting ordained by us. Many more are catching the vision and we could see thousands of churches joining Citigates in the coming years.

 

TO GOD BE THE GLORY!

 

 

 REV. BENEDICTO D. AGTANI, ThD