bahrain christian fellowship

boy with a pack of lunch, the hand that provided the only stable income stream for the both of them. He was enjoying a good sense of job security and a large measure of influence at a steel company of his best friend as a trusted man looking after its accounting department.

In 1985, however, he was thrown into a crossroads as he weighed his options of ditching a lucrative job or teaching full time at FEBIAS College of Bible. Pastor Freddie quit his job in the same reckless abandon of a child.
Put that aside for a moment and push backward to Pastor Freddie’s growing-up years.

He was the only child of a Chinese couple. Born outside of marriage, he faced contempt as a child from relatives, who never had fully embraced him as one of their own. The scorn he endured soon drove him into rage, and he developed hatred toward his relatives, his mother included.

At the peak of his father’s logging business, Pastor Freddie was amply provided. He attended private Chinese schools. Before long, however, his father fell ill and never recovered. The years following his father’s demise were trying times for him. He was largely left to fend for himself, making a living doing odd jobs at a truck body-building factory of his father’s cousin.
Upon entering college, Pastor Freddie armed himself with a lofty goal even though money was hard to come by. He took B.S. in Zoology at the University of the Philippines (UP), gearing himself up for medical school. He worked at the campus library to help support himself. He also received a big boost from his mother, who became a market vendor to put him through college.

The hand of God caught up with Pastor Freddie while at UP. Campus volunteers from the State Varsity Christian Fellowship reached out to him, and he received salvation in December of 1973. The authenticity of his encounter with God was unmistakable to him when, in the ensuing days, he realized he held no rancor any longer against any of his relatives.As it happened, that conversion experience became the defining moment for his journey toward full-time church ministry.

When an opportunity arose for a full-time teaching job at FEBIAS, Pastor Freddie knew in his heart it was time for him to move away from his comforts at that steel company and into full-time ministry. He had always considered himself a perfect fit for teaching and pastoral duties. At that time, he had had more than thoroughly prepared himself, finishing cum laude in his Master’s Degree in Church Studies at Asian Theological Seminary. He had also concurrently served as an assistant to the pastor at the Kalookan Evangelical Christian Church, his home church. While at FEBIAS, Pastor Freddie extended himself into the Pulpit Ministry, which obviously required him to preach.

In an unexpected turn of event, Pastor Freddie landed in Bahrain in 1990 on a trip that was meant to be nothing more than a casual visit, as he set out to fetch his wife, Sister Leng, after they had reached a decision to start a ministry together in the Philippines. God, however, had another plan. As it turned out, the visit fell around the same time the Church of Philadelphia in Bahrain was seeking a dean for its newly opened Bible school. Pastor Freddie made the deanship.

A few years later, in yet another unfolding of God’s grand design, the spotlight turned on Pastor Freddie when the Bahrain Christian Fellowship (BCF) was scouting around for an ordained minister. That was in 1995. He has been at the BCF helm since then, feeding a multitude.