More than 4000 people have been baptised in the Trans Pacific Union Mission (TPUM) in 2019 as a result of women serving on the frontline of discipleship and evangelism.
In a presentation at last week’s Division year-end meetings, Union president Pastor Maveni Kaufononga said 2019 was all about giving women opportunities to serve the Lord through evangelism.
TPUM designated 2019 as the “Year of the Women”: for women to take the lead in this year’s “harvesting” program. The program was launched in Tonga at the TPUM women’s congress in April, which was attended by about 600 participants. One of the main aims of the congress was to equip and empower the women so that they could reach out to their own communities with the gospel message. They were taught how to run small groups, evangelistic campaigns and other discipleship activities.
A total of 1643 women participated in the program, with the July harvest yielding 4223 baptisms. In American Samoa, there were 35 participants and 145 baptisms. In Fiji, there were 441 participants and 1007 baptisms, while Solomon Islands had 350 participants and 1580 baptisms. The tiny Pacific nation of Kiribati had six participants, resulting in 67 baptisms. The results in other countries: Samoa 508 participants (536 baptisms), Nauru 1 (1), Tonga 19 (138), Niue 1 (1), Vanuatu 261 (745) and Tuvalu 21 (3).
“We are excited about seeing the number of women who got involved with our program,” Pastor Kaufononga said.
He also shared the latest church membership statistics for TPUM, with the number of members increasing from 114,042 in 2015 to 125,595 in 2018.
