The Iowa Missions Offering is named in honor of two Iowa natives who served as missionaries in the Philippines until Bill was killed in a 2003 terrorist attack in the Manila airport.
Bill and Garlinda lived out the vision of preparing and embracing new church leaders during their 25 years of service as missionary leaders. Bill and Garlinda had a passion for planting new churches. Bill’s vision was to multiply new church leaders to do the work of church planting. During the latter years of his ministry in the Philippines he and Lyn moved to Mindanao and focused on that passion.
It is known that he facilitated the planting of 600 churches. One January, he hosted a Pioneer Evangelism conference with 3,700 participants. It was probably the largest such conference ever held, and from it 1,086 new church planting teams were formed. It was expected that each team would plant three churches. Hyde had plans for training 150 Filipinos as trainers the next year and through them, training another 7,000 lay people in church planting. “This was a remarkable man,” said Thurman Braughton, a recently retired IMB missionary who worked with Hyde. “This guy took what we were doing and multiplied it 10-fold, maybe 100-fold. He was a big man with a big vision.”
- Pray that God will continue to raise up visionary leaders in the world and in Iowa.
- Pray that multiplying new churches and leaders will be a priority of every church within the state of Iowa.
- Pray that the leaders and churches raised up would be strong and healthy and reproduce themselves to serve the coming generations of Iowa.
Find resources to promote the Iowa Missions Offering at bciowa.org/imoresources.
