Tom O’Brien is a carpenter from Chicago. He left Chicago with his wife and three children at the age of 26 over 22 years ago. Why? To reach Muslims on the island of Mindanao near Iligan City, the place where we have been living the past 12 days. We met him there and were blessed to tour his campus outside the city during our stay. He founded the Life Resources Foundation and has been working with the Muslim peoples of Mindanao and surrounding islands for the majority of his life, raising all three of his children in the Philippines.
As a result of giving their lives away for the Kingdom, Tom and his wife have built an incredibly beautiful training school on a mountain just outside Iligan City. While we visited the campus there were probably 30 Filipino missionaries being trained, all of whom will be strategically placed to reach places where there are no churches and the people have no access to the gospel of Jesus.
Here is his statement of purpose from the home page I linked above:
The Life Resources Foundation (LRF) is a Bible training center that equips students to plant churches among the least reached Muslim people groups of Southeast Asia. To complement our strong emphasis in Bible, we also teach and train our students to minister to the whole person, through community health, literacy, and agriculture.
The Life Resources Foundation, Inc. exists to equip people, through biblical training and life-skills development, to plant churches among the least-reached, and to make an impact in their communities for the glory of God. Transforming committed disciples into prepared, faithful and fruitful church-planters is the heartbeat of the Life Resources Foundation.
This is an amazing program. I’d highly recommend that you look into it and consider supporting their school. For just $1000.00 per year, a missionary student can study for an entire year, being provided all of their room and board. I know $1000.00 sounds like a lot of money, but think about feeding and housing someone for an entire year for that amount?! Not only that, but the individual is being trained to be a missionary and church planter for Muslims throughout the Philippines, in places where there are no churches at all.