The first mission trip that our church (First Bible Church) made to the Philippines was in 1995. It was during that trip that I learned from Pastor Vic Serrano that there was not a good translation of the Bible in the Cebuano language, the language spoken by thirty million people in the southern Philippines. Pastor Serrano told us however that Bro. Ruben and a group of Filipino pastors had been working for almost seven years to translate the King James Bible into Cebuano. It took until the next year (May, 1996) to finally meet Ruben and sit down with him and the other pastors to discuss the translation. Their progress had been very slow up until that time. They had very little support from other churches. Their computer was antiquated and more than once they had lost important files and lost precious time in having to redo their work. After that first meeting, our friendship and fellowship with Bro. Ruben began to grow and we began to look for ways that First Bible Church could be a blessing. In 1997 I took with me to the Philippines an American missionary named Tom Gaudet, who had an extensive background in printing. Brother Tom decided to stay in the Philippines for an extended period of time to help Brother Ruben better understand Bible translation principles and to give him the training he needed to start a printing ministry.
Since that first meeting in 1996, it has been a great privilege and joy to get to know Bro. Ruben better, to see his love for the Word of God, and his faithfulness through many difficult and discouraging years. I have met and worked with many good Filipino pastors in our eighteen trips to Mindanao, but I truly believe Bro. Ruben is one of God’s unsung heroes. He is a man of unquestioned integrity and his conviction concerning the perfection and preservation of the King James Bible puts him in that small number of real, true “Bible believers”.
