When the late Federico “Fred” Mission Magbanua Jr. preached a radio sermon on offering one’s body as a living sacrifice, he probably didn’t imagine he’d sooner or later hear these words again as a ten,000-watt radio frequency current surged through him in a near-death accident.
It happened one night in early 1961, while Magbanua was working on the Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC) gospel radio ministry. He was mulling over a job offer within the United States with a salary far greater than what he currently made as an FEBC engineer and as a pastor of a small Baptist church.
Suddenly, the warning lights on the 308-foot radio tower went out. Magbanua loaded some latest bulbs right into a bag and started climbing the structure. From his home nearby, his daughters and his wife, Aliw, watched him scale the tower.
What Magbanua didn’t realize was that the grounding system—which diverts energy to the bottom to forestall surges—wasn’t working. A radio frequency current “hit his head using his body as a lightning rod,” his friend Harold Sala later told God Reports. “Literally, he was being executed by the tremendous surge of electrical power.”
The program that was airing at that moment was one which Magbanua himself had hosted on Romans 12:1–2. “Through the sparking, he heard his own voice in his head saying, ‘Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to supply your bodies as a living sacrifice,’” recounted former FEBC head Dan Andrew Cura.
Miraculously, Magbanua was released by the present and fell to a step that was several feet from the highest of the tower as a substitute of falling 300 feet to the bottom. He managed to climb down the ladder and get to the corporate nurse’s office, where he collapsed. When Aliw later saw him within the clinic, he was swaddled in towels like a baby, his whole head of hair burnt. He ended up hospitalized for months, as doctors needed to graft skin from his thighs to cover the lost skin on his head.
Yet the experience “literally jolted him out of his reasoning” to go away the country, Cura said. Once he was healed, Magbanua lived and served within the Philippines until his death in 2013. He worked for FEBC for the following 33 years, including as its first non-American managing director. After that, he went on to begin a church-planting movement that sought to ascertain “a church in every barangay” (or neighborhood). He also influenced a latest generation of Filipino evangelical leaders, including Efraim Tendero, the previous secretary general of the World Evangelical Alliance.
In a day and age where church scandals go viral far too often within the Philippines, many church leaders say they present in Magbanua a model for living a lifetime of integrity and ending the race well.
“He showed me the right way to have a heart that genuinely serves God,” Tendero told Evangelical Today TV. “He exemplified the right way to conduct one’s self and, when coping with controversy, to not be swayed.” Tendero added that Magbanua maintained this principle in ministry to remain “right before God.”
Humble beginnings
Magbanua was born in 1932 within the central Philippine province of Negros Occidental, the son of a fisherman. His family was poor, and as a young boy, Magbanua walked five kilometers (about three miles) barefoot to attend school. He was in highschool when he heard the gospel and committed his life to Christ while listening to an FEBC program under a mango tree. He ended up studying civil engineering on the Mapúa Institute of Technology (now Mapúa University) in Manila while working odd jobs.
In 1957, Magbanua met and married Viola Aliw Cachola, then an English teacher. He bought a marriage ring for 20 pesos (36 cents) and the marriage ceremony took place at a missionary’s garden on Thanksgiving Day.
Magbanua’s first ministry project was to begin a neighborhood church within the town of Victoria within the province of Laguna. He and his wife would receive 35 pesos (62 cents) a month as ministry support, which meant that sometimes they might eat just one meal a day.
“You married a pastor and now you’re going to die of hunger,” Aliw remembers her mother telling her. She retorted, “Don’t worry, I’m comfortable here even when we’re not eating.”
As their family grew—the Magbanuas would have five children—the pastor was tempted to search out more profitable work within the United States. When he told Aliw that the move would allow him to offer the cash he made to God, she was firm: “I don’t agree along with your plan,” she remembers saying. “We should stay here.”
Then, after the shocking tower experience, Magbanua himself felt convicted to remain.
FEBC and beyond
In 1965, Magbanua became chair of the newly founded Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC), which then had only 11 member churches. A breakaway entity from the progressive National Council of Churches within the Philippines, PCEC wanted to emphasise evangelism over social justice. Today the umbrella group has 55,000 member churches.
For the following three many years, Magbanua worked on the gospel radio station. At first, he was the top of engineering, and he eventually worked his way as much as managing director of the ministry. In 1971, Magbanua became the primary Filipino to go FEBC Philippines, causing some jealous murmurs. His colleagues were used to “imported leaders” from America, his daughter, Joy Magbuana-Huerte, said.
While on the helm of FEBC, the ministry expanded into several local radio stations, including one which reached indigenous tribes on Mindoro Island. It also launched a Filipino gospel music label that produced 20 albums and earned awards from the Philippine press.
In a move that some find controversial today, the radio ministry remained silent when President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, ushering in his dictatorship. While other media groups who critiqued the move were shut down, FEBC was allowed to proceed broadcasting.
Planting churches within the barangay
Magbanua stepped down from FEBC in 1992 as he reached the retirement age of 60. “But I’m still young,” he said within the early 2000s. “I believe I should still be useful in advancing God’s kingdom.”
He looked to his country’s rural areas, where lots of the estimated 42,000 barangays—the smallest administrative unit within the Philippines, overseen by the local city or municipal government—didn’t have an evangelical church.
Image: Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Portrait Courtesy of FEBC
Official portrait of Fred Magbanua within the Nineteen Eighties as managing director of FEBC.
“I made a promise to the Lord that I’ll search for barangays and not using a church and help pastors working there,” Magbanua said within the video. He explained that pastors serving in distant areas normally leave and hand over due to hardship. “In those barangays, you’d be blessed should you had a monthly offering totaling 500 pesos,” he said, an amount around $10.
Magbanua-Huerte, who served as her father’s executive assistant after he retired, said her father desired to plant holistic churches that not only preached the gospel but provided health care, education, and financial help. Because of Magbanua’s own experience growing up in poverty, he understood the difficulties that pastors and their families face when planting churches in impoverished areas.
“People [there] don’t have jobs,” he said. “They would tithe chicken, eggs, banana, pumpkin, and fish. Yes, the pastors would have something to eat, but when their children get sick, they don’t have any money for medicine. When their kids have to go to high school, [there’s] no money for fees.”
The idea to plant holistic churches in unreached barangays, nonetheless, didn’t pan well along with his fellow Baptists, who were more focused on discipleship, in accordance with Magbuana-Huerte. Instead of causing conflict, Magbanua decided to go away the denomination and, with their blessing, he began Christ Jesus Our Life in 1992, a church-planting movement.
His movement began a pastoral support fund inspired by 2 Corinthians 8:15, where 40 percent of a neighborhood church’s income went into a typical fund that was then divided amongst all of the pastors throughout the movement. This was to assist church leaders serving in additional economically depressed areas.
He urged Filipino church leaders to prioritize church planting and was also mindful of the church’s location, emphasizing that it have to be at most a ten-minute walk from where members lived in order that they wouldn’t should pay for public transportation to get to church.
“His desire is [that] every barangay, every Filipino who must know the Lord, can have access to a spot where they will hear the gospel,” Aliw said. “Even in the event that they are deeply impoverished, they will still afford to go to church.”
Today Christ Jesus Our Life has around 160 churches. Magbanua-Huerte pastors within the Philippine province of Palawan and oversees around 40 congregations, half of that are in indigenous communities. Reminiscent of where her father first heard the gospel, several congregations conduct their services under a mango tree.
Mediator and non secular statesman
Several people near Magbanua noted the consistency in his witness. For instance, he maintained the identical rigor and discipline in preparing for his sermons well into his 70s. On a sheet of paper folded into thirds, he would jot down his outline filling each section with the start, middle, and end. His wife said he would normally prepare for his preaching a minimum of per week prematurely.
“My dad really preached from the Word,” said his eldest daughter, Grace Vowell. Regardless of the sermon’s topic, he would at all times end it with an invite to commit one’s life to Jesus Christ.
As a founding father of a growing denomination and an elder amongst evangelical leaders, Magbanua offered advice to other church leaders who got here to him and mediated internal conflicts. Rey Corpuz, the previous head of the Philippine Missionary Association, recalls a time when evangelicals and Pentecostals didn’t work with one another.
“There’s a funny side to Manong Fred,” Corpuz said, using the title for an elderly person or person of stature. “He baptized himself as a Bapticostal.” A conservative Baptist, Magbanua actively built relationships with Pentecostals, which drew criticism from his peers.
In July 2012, family and friends celebrated Magbanua’s eightieth birthday with the theme “From a son of a fisherman to a fisher of men.” Vowell said that her father prayed to live one other ten years, as he hoped to see Christ Jesus Our Life plant 300 churches by 2023. Yet she also recalled him saying, “If [God] desires to take me, that’s positive—I’m ready.”
Several months later, Magbanua went to get an endoscopy and doctors informed him that he had stage IV stomach cancer. He died three months in a while January 21, 2013.
“He began strong, he began well within the ministry, and up until his last breath, he was anointing a latest, younger leader,” said Noel Pantoja, who viewed Magbanua as a second father. Pantoja served with Magbanua planting churches with Christ Jesus Our Life and later established several Filipino-American congregations in Washington, DC.
“If you … depend on your personal strength and your personal wisdom, you can’t do it,” Pantoja remembers Magbanua telling him from his hospital bed. “If you’re feeling you’re not able to doing it, that you simply usually are not qualified, that’s the primary qualification, since you will rely upon the facility of God, the facility of the Holy Spirit.”
