Past fragrant mango trees and shacks with clothes hanging on laundry lines stands a canopy made of coconut timber typically used to shade locals waiting for a tuk-tuk or habal-habal (motorcycle taxi). But today, 14 children ages 3 to 12 gather there in 90-degree heat for Sunday school. They sing along as a teacher in his mid-40s strums Bethel Music’s “Goodness of God” on his guitar, accompanied by roosters crowing in the background.
After singing in English and Filipino, the teacher leads them in a short prayer and jumps into a Bible lesson about Jesus feeding the 5,000. The children break out into big grins as the older kids help hand out lunches of green peas, pork, and white rice. The Sunday school has also started adding English and math classes following the Bible lesson.
Every Sunday, the scene repeats in 14 villages in San Juan, a municipality on the island of Siquijor in the Philippines. Doris Ann Lantoria, who grew up in San Juan, started the Sunday schools in 2015 after hearing a sermon in Malaysia on reaching out to children for Jesus. She felt convicted to share the gospel with children in remote areas of Siquijor.
“Wherever children are, we put a Sunday school there,” said the 49-year-old.
Siquijor has a long history of witchcraft and animism, which mixed with Catholicism when the Spanish came to the island in the 18th century. While 94 percent of Siquijor residents identify as Catholic, they also hold on to animist beliefs, including healing potions, mangkukulam (witches), and bolo-bolo healers, who use stones and a glass of water to cure ailments.
Although many mothers and grandmothers attend Mass in Siquijor, they often don’t bring their kids because they are noisy and unable to sit still. Catholic churches in Siquijor only hold Catechism classes for children in the month of May. Lantoria, who grew up attending both Catholic and Protestant churches in San Juan, had never attended Sunday school.
But her Arise to Christ Ministry Sunday schools and Saturday worship nights work to make everyone feel involved, Doris said. “The songs are contemporary, and the sermon is contextualized for their age.”
I first met Lantoria a year ago when she attended an online seminary class I was teaching. At the end of the course, students from all over Malaysia and the Philippines flew into Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a two-day, in-person class. During a lunch break, she described the 17-bed guesthouse and restaurant she runs in the travel destination of Siquijor. Most of her staff members—the chefs, baristas, and cleaners—double as Sunday school teachers and worship leaders in her ministry.
Last June, my family and I traveled to Siquijor by plane and ferry to see Lantoria’s ministry in person. The evening we arrived, a storm had hit the island, and only a few shops had their lights on. (Later we learned that Siquijor often loses power for 18–20 hours a day.) Lantoria welcomed us in the heavy rain, and her staff drove us 20 minutes over the bumpy roads to her guesthouse, Sea View Resort.
Connected to the guesthouse is the open-air Tawhay Resto Café, which served Malaysian, Chinese, and Western cuisine as worship music played. Christian books lined the bookshelves, and Bible verses decorated the windows. Tawhay, which means “relax,” was the first café in the district of San Juan. When Lantoria opened it in 2019, locals doubted anyone would pay 130–150 pesos (about $2.50 USD) for coffee when instant coffee packets cost a fraction of the price. Yet as tourism started booming in Siquijor, visitors came to Tawhay looking for good coffee and an Instagrammable café.
Money from the guesthouse and café supports Arise to Christ Ministry. Last year, the business made enough for her to contribute 5 million pesos ($86,000 USD) to the ministry, which gives high school and college scholarships to 60 students and feeds 400–500 kids weekly. It is also in the process of building a youth worship center.
Born and raised in Siquijor island, Lantoria has deep roots in the area, as her grandfather was the former mayor of San Juan. She grew up regularly accompanying her grandmother to Mass and her grandfather to his church with the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. At the age of 20, Lantoria moved to Malaysia after marrying a Chinese Malaysian (they later divorced) and lived in Kuala Lumpur for 26 years. It was there that she came to faith in Christ through a women’s Bible study and joined a church.
“When I saw one Sunday school in Malaysia, it instantly clicked to me that this is what was needed in Siquijor,” said Lantoria.
From 2015, she started flying back to Siquijor every three months to set up Sunday schools. In 2017, she started giving out scholarships to students unable to afford school fees, including books, uniforms, or food. “Village people are generally poor,” Lantoria said. “What they earn today is food for today.” By 2018, she was flying back every two weeks.
During one of her trips to Siquijor in March 2020, the government shut down the area due to the COVID-19 pandemic, trapping Lantoria on the island for two years. Throughout that time, she discipled the youth and expanded her café and lodging businesses, eventually deciding to stay in Siquijor after the pandemic.
From 2019 to 2023, she taught 12 Bible classes each weekend wherever she could find space: basketball courts, a local’s porch, canopies, or large trees. By 2022, she was exhausted from running from village to village and realized she needed to raise other leaders to teach the classes. She began training the scholarship students, teaching them about Jesus. Several of them started teaching the Sunday schools.
Because many of the new leaders were young in their faith, Lantoria wrote down each lesson for them to repeat verbatim. One Sunday school teacher, 32-year-old Jayce Mae Vios, said that as she taught the students, it “helped me learn what happened in the Bible at the same time.”
Today, Lantoria’s adult and youth leaders teach all but one of the classes.
As the children reached their teen years, Lantoria realized they needed a place to worship. About 90 percent of the young people who attend Arise to Christ come from a Catholic background and would never step into an evangelical church, Lantoria said. So she started a Saturday night worship service for the youth.
When my family and I visited on a humid summer night, more than 150 teens gathered to eat dinner in the half-finished building of Lantoria’s second café. Then they walked to the unfinished worship center to sing and listen to her preach. Halfway through, a downpour halted the worship service, as the center did not yet have a roof or walls. Together with the teens, we ran back to the café. As rain drummed on the metal roof, we continued to worship.
Many of the attendees had attended Lantoria’s Sunday school for years. Lantoria and the teachers built relationships with families as they fed their children, taught them the Bible, and visited their homes. One mom spotted Lantoria as she drove down the road to pick up other young people for the worship night. The mom shouted, “Don’t forget to pick up my child to go to Saturday service!”
Lantoria noted that the teens are eager to attend because San Juan has few activities geared toward youth. Many of them spend their time playing basketball or scrolling on their phones.
Liezel Laranjo, 46, is one of the few adults who attend the worship service. Her children attended Arise to Christ activities and told her what they had learned. Although she grew up Catholic, “it was nice to hear about the word of God” from her children, she said. When Laranjo joined the Sunday school in 2019, she found her faith growing.
She also started attending the Saturday worship service with her children this June. Laranjo said that since Jesus forgave and saved her, she wants to give the “gift of our lives” to him and worship him.
Not only have her children received scholarships through Lantoria’s ministry; her daughter also worked at Tawhay until her recent pregnancy, and Laranjo works at the guesthouse. “The ministry helped my family a lot in ways like provision for food, teaching, and guidance,” she said. “[It] made us whole spiritually and physically.”
Ministering in Siquijor is difficult due to deep roots of witchcraft in the island. Siquijor is known as “Island of Witches” or “Mystic Island” and is seeing a revival of tourists interested in magical healings and potions. It is common to see vendors selling voodoo dolls, sacred stones, and amulets on the streets.
Although the Spanish brought Catholicism to the Philippines in the 16th century, it wasn’t until 200 years later that the Catholic missionaries set foot on Siquijor island.
“Catholicism was supposed to replace the witchcraft and animism, but instead it got mixed with Catholicism,” she said. For instance, on Black Saturday (the day before Easter Sunday), “healers” in Siquijor gather for the annual Healing Festival, where they create a sticky paste they believe can cure ailments. On Palm Sunday, locals spray palm leaves with holy water, then craft them into the shape of a cross or a flower and put them around their houses or boats to ward off evil, Lantoria explained.
But in her Sunday school classes, Lantoria teaches the children that though people used palm leaves to welcome Jesus, they don’t have any special powers. “People seek a faith healer, and they’re told they may have offended [the spirit of a] big tree, like the old acacia or balete tree, and [are] asked to offer a whole chicken, rice, eggs,or Coke,” Lantoria said. “I go against that and tell them to chase the spirit away!”
Deep-seated pagan beliefs and superstition make it difficult to reach the people of Siquijor, said Josephine Bulado Malicay, a Filipina missionary with the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board (IMB). From 2008 to 2010, she served in Siquijor’s Lazi municipality, where she led Bible studies and took part in door-to-door evangelism.
Her colleague Jess Jennings, who has been based in the Philippines since 1993, said IMB has sent many Filipino and American short-term mission teams to Siquijor and found that some people were responsive to the gospel and willing to study the Bible. Those teams have been able to help locals plant one or two churches on the island, where only 2 percent of the population is evangelical, Jennings said. Yet they don’t think enough Filipinos are willing to go and stay long-term.
“There seems to be fear of the reputation that Siquijor has of witchcraft. And because of some resistance to the gospel, not many are willing to come from outside of Siquijor and stay a long time,” Jennings said. “The harvest is plentiful and seems to be ripe.”
As a businesswoman and a local, Lantoria is an insider in Siquijor. Over the years, she has gained the trust of residents in San Juan. Recently, she started a guitar class that meets every Saturday afternoon. The class is free, although the students need to attend a 45-minute Bible study prior to the guitar lesson. Twice a week, Lantoria disciples young people and leads worship team practices.
Lantoria said that when she started her ministry, her Baptist uncle criticized her for teaching Catholic children, because they were of a “different religion because they pray to saints.” When Lantoria’s uncle converted from Catholicism, he removed all the icons in Lantoria’s Catholic grandmother’s house, saying, “Throw them away, or you will go to hell.” His harsh response made her grandmother uninterested in learning about her eldest son’s new faith.
Lantoria pushed back: “I will stay with the Roman Catholic children because they need to know the truth.” Lantoria said she doesn’t attack Catholics. Although she believes that local Catholics have combined the Bible with local traditions, she said, “I am making their strayed teachings straight, using the Bible.”
“Unlike other pastors, who say, ‘If you pray to saints or if you are Catholic, you will go to hell,’ I don’t do it that way,” she said. “I give [them] Bible passages where it says we are all saints. I don’t condemn them for going to the Roman Catholic Church, but I want to put Jesus back to where he belongs, as number one.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the relative who criticized Lantoria’s ministry.
Esther Shin Chuang is an award-winning concert pianist, a singer, and the director of the worship program at Malaysia Baptist Theological Seminary. She and her husband are pastors at Georgetown Baptist Church in Penang, Malaysia.
