Hi I’m Courtney Godsoe missionary to the Philippines. I just want to share a little bit about my personal testimony. First off—my salvation: I was saved as a small boy in the town of Plymouth, Maine. The only church in town was a Baptist church, and my family attended there. One day when I was six years old, we had an evangelist come by the church, and he preached the Gospel and gave an invitation. I went up with my Sunday school teacher after the message, and she shared the Gospel with me. I received Christ as my Saviour at that time, and I knew from then on out for sure that I was saved.
While our family was faithful in church—we were involved in church for about another six years. Then my family got out of church, and hence I backslid from that time on until I was a 21-year-old young man in the Navy. God had kept tugging on my heart since I had been away from Him for nine years. Finally, I couldn’t stand the pressure anymore. I got back in church, got baptized, and became very faithful.
About a year after that, I met my wife, a godly young woman who was already faithful in a Baptist church, while my ship was in the Philippines. We got married in 1979, and we stayed in the Navy until I retired in 2004.
All during that time, we stayed faithful to churches. Whenever we would transfer, we would get plugged in to another Baptist church. We worked in just about any ministry you could think of, especially the Bus Ministry. I was a bus director at one church. We were in the choir. I was a deacon at three different churches. We just did whatever we could, and as time went on, it seemed that we couldn’t do a lot more without going full-time in the ministry.
I just kept considering missions to the Philippines. I considered the fact that I had a Filipino wife. I had learned to speak her language fluently, and i felt an affinity with the Filipino people. So coming up on my retirement time from the Navy in 1994, I went with my pastor, Mike Haines, for a missions trip in the Philippines, and God changed my heart from considering becoming a missionary to definitely becoming a missionary.
So we got out of the Navy, moved up to Hammond, Indiana, and attended Hyles-Anderson College. We graduated and went on deputation, and now we are in the Philippines. We have been in the Philippines since July of 2004. We started Providence Baptist Church in January of 2005. God has blessed our church; we are right along the highway. We started a Bible college a year after we started our church.
God has just kept blessing. We have started another outreach work not too far—actually on my wife’s jeepney route, and we’ve got some great folks coming from that area. God is blessing, and God is really using the Philippines to reach Asia for Christ as well. There are a lot of things going on there, and we are grateful to be a part of it.
We’re also grateful for the many folks who support us financially and the many folks who pray for us and our ministry. We thank God for you all. Thank you very much.