ACM is the missionary training arm of The 700 Club Asia
ACM Ushers In New Leadership PDF Print E-mail
This April, Asian Center for Missions (ACM), CBN Asia’s cross-cultural missionary training arm, welcomes a new season of great harvest with new leadership from Nathaniel Ramos, ACM’s new national director.

Nat, as he is fondly called, is a graduate of Christian Ministries from Bethel Bible College and has a master’s degree in counseling from Alliance Graduate School. He served as a pastor for 13 years before enrolling in ACM’s missionary training program in 1997.

For his international exposure trip, Nat went to Japan where he saw various marital burdens and abuse among Filipinos married to Japanese.

Nat immediately caught the vision for his Great Commission calling, and from 1998 to 2001 he and his family lived in Tokyo, where he started cross-cultural marriage counseling for Filipino-Japanese couples.

Through Nat’s ministry many Japanese came to know Jesus and were referred to churches. His counseling support groups grew and expanded to other areas like Ibaraki, Saitama and Yokohama.

He was supposed to bring his ministry to Sydney, Australia. But when that door of opportunity was closed, ACM invited him back to the Philippines in 2003 to head the Central Luzon center in Angeles City.
Under Nat’s management, the regional center produced four batches of ACM graduates, many of them now heeding their missionary calling in Asia’s Gospel frontiers.

In 2005, Nat helped put up ACM’s Ilocos center in Laoag. In that same year, he was already positioned by Elsie Reyes, former ACM Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, to take her place.

Today Nat bears the mantle of mobilizing, training and facilitating the sending of missionaries, as well as facing up to the challenges brought by the changing landscape in the mission field.

He sees ACM’s next important step is unprecedented expansion, to truly fulfill the Philippines’ prophecy as a great missionary sending-nation.

“I remember Gordon Robertson’s vision given to him by God–boatloads of Filipinos reaching out to the nations. That’s why he started ACM,” Nat says.

“Since then the response to this vision is individual and personal. But our response should not just be individual, but national. We should come to a point where the whole country responds to God’s global agenda,” he adds.

Nat says this vision of expansion can be readily achieved through bayanihan among local ministerial fellowships, ACM regional managers and their advisory councils. Their collective response to missions should be elevated from individual to corporate to national.

Nat is also excited to see missionaries doing pioneer work in new territories where the Gospel has not been heard. He also envisions Filipino churches and migrant workers scattered around the globe playing a pivotal role in expanding missions.

“These Filipino diaspora churches can be receiving organizations, potential donors, and they can even be training centers,” explains Nat.

“Then our OFWs, before they leave the Philippines, can be trained in missions. They’ll see a bigger purpose in being migrant workers: to become a blessing to the world. Once they begin to understand this, going into missions is no longer a profession but a lifestyle,” he concludes.