A Tribute to Rev. Roque Cagas Sr
By: Rev. Narciso Dionson
Rev Roque Cagas Sr will be remembered differently by different people. But to those who belong to the Christian denomination called the Assemblies of God in the Cebuano speaking regions of the country, the legacy Rev Roque Cagas will not be forgotten.
In 1953, he was still in his twenties when he graduated from a small Assemblies of God Bible Institute based in Sogod, Leyte. He was among the first batch of graduates. At that time there were a few scattered Assemblies of God churches in Antique and Cotabato, but none in the Cebuano speaking regions of Central and Eastern Visayas and Northern Mindanao. He was looking around for his place in this vast mission field when a call came from Northwestern Mindanao.
A Pentecostal revival had broken out in Jimenez, in Misamis Occidental. The Jalapit family who returned from Cotabato brought with them a strange experience they called the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Soon relatives and friends gathered to hear people who came all the way from Southern Cotabato, a trip that in those years took days over some very rough roads.
They needed a pastor and the most likely candidate was the earnest young graduate of Immanuel Bible Institute of Sogod, Leyte, who graduated at the top of his class.
The young pastoral candidate had enough responsibilities to keep him busy. Aside from Jimenez, revivals were breaking out all over the two Misamis provinces, Lanao and Zamboanga as well as in Bohol and Leyte. He could not preach in all these places so he called upon his Bible Institute classmates and friends to help to gather the rich harvest. So fast was the growth of the Assemblies of God churches that by 1957 when I enrolled at Immanuel Bible Institute, I had schoolmates from these places but even more remarkable was that some of the students of the school from the churches that resulted from the revival have already graduated the previous school year. In other words, churches under his care were sending young ministry candidates for training almost as soon as they got converted or were introduced to the Pentecostal revival!
Today the Cebuano speaking Assemblies of God remains the most dynamic regions of the denomination in the Philippines.
The legacy of Rev Roque Cagas is in channeling the Pentecostal revival into a fast growing world-wide movement and fellowship of the Assemblies of God. Not all who would be presented with a similar revival thrown into their lap would not be tempted to turn it into a church movement revolving around themselves and their family. It is the gift and global foresight of the Reverend Roque Cagas to preserve the renewal movement within the larger universal fellowship.
Later in 1953, Immanuel Bible Institute moved from Sogod to Cebu City. Rev Brengle was a Bible Institute builder but not a pastor. With the arrival in 1954 of other American missionaries of the Assemblies of God in the Western Visayas, the Visayas and Northern Mindanao District of the Philippines General Council of the Assemblies of God was born, the parent of all the Districts in the Cebuano speaking regions of the country. Although American missionaries served as its first District Superintendents, much of the credit for the formation of Visnomin belongs to Rev Roque Cagas.
He planted well. Others participated in the increase. But both sower and reaper rejoiced together.
