The Asia Conference on Church & Mission concluded Thursday evening in Alabang, Metro Manila, with delegates from 25 nations pressed to leave not with good intentions but with a named commitment — a specific congregation or community they would personally shepherd toward disciple-making in the year ahead.
The closing session at GCF South Metro on June 11 drew together the final threads of a three-day gathering held under the banner "Disciple or Die 3.0," organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in collaboration with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches.
It featured a keynote by Indian church leader C.B. Samuel, closing remarks by World Evangelical Alliance Secretary General Rev. Botrus Mansour, and a commissioning ceremony led by AEA General Secretary Dr. Bambang Budijanto that ended with delegates physically crossing a symbolic bridge erected at the front of the room and planting a white flag bearing the name of a church they had committed, before God, to help transform.
The following day, June 12, ACCM participants were joined by approximately 800 Filipino pastors and Christian leaders for an International Disciple Making Conference — an additional day focused on carrying the week's themes into the Philippine church at the local level.
What your disciples would say about you
C.B. Samuel, drawing from Acts chapter 20, structured his address around a question he put to every person in the room: when you step back from active ministry, what would those you have discipled say about how you lived?
He opened with a thought experiment drawn from author Stephen Covey — imagining one's own funeral, watching from above as those closest to you approach the coffin and speak. "Steven Covey says, if you want people to say something about you, he says, learn to live the future," Samuel said. The point, he argued, is that a discipler must know what they are working toward, and that clarity of purpose cannot be improvised at the end.
He traced this focus back to Jesus. "In John 17, he tells the Father, 'I have completed the task that you gave me,'" Samuel said. "It's not just Jesus — it is very clear that almost all the New Testament writers seem to have lived according to the purpose that God had."
From Paul's farewell address to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20, Samuel drew four qualities he said every discipler should aspire to be known for.
The first was transparency. Paul's statement — "You know how I lived from the first day I came" — was not, Samuel argued, a claim made to a general audience but to people who had watched him closely over years. "Transparency is not something in which you talk to everybody when you go for a conference," he said. "It is the people who you disciple who can look back and say, 'We know how he lived.'" He pressed delegates to allow those they are forming to see their vulnerabilities, not just their strengths.
The second was passion. Samuel pointed to Paul's language of tears — in verse 19, serving "with great humility and with tears," and again in verse 31, warning people "night and day with tears." Discipling, Samuel argued, is closer to parenting than to teaching. "If discipling does not break you because you love the people, Jesus wept," he said. He asked delegates when they had last prayed specifically for a person they were discipling, noting that Jesus prayed for Peter even when Peter showed no sign of needing it.
Third was focus. Samuel recalled an encounter aboard an Operation Mobilization ship, where a colleague told him that founder George Verwer could only ever be found in one of two places. "Talking to people about God," Samuel said, "or talking to God about people." That, he told the gathering, is what focused discipleship looks like from the outside — and what those you disciple should be able to say of you.
Fourth was integrity — specifically financial. Samuel cited Paul's declaration that he had not coveted anyone's silver, gold or clothing. The application was direct. "When I finally leave, I can look back and say, 'I did not become rich at the expense of the people I led,'" he said, acknowledging the pressure on Christian leaders in many contexts to accumulate wealth under the cover of ministry.
Samuel closed by encouraging participants to apply these principles in their leadership moving forward. "It is about defining our direction for the future as we go from here."
Crossing the bridge
The closing commissioning, led by Budijanto, was designed to conclude with a practical and specific commitment.
He told delegates that God can work through a single person, but only if that person's heart is genuinely changed first. He pointed to the example of a pastor, who had not begun his work of transforming his congregation by announcing a new vision or restructuring his church's programs. Instead, he had quietly begun discipling those immediately around him. Over time, the elders saw how he was living and began to raise the question of change themselves. "God led him to begin with actual changing from within," Budijanto said. "So start from within. It all starts with us."
He emphasized that structures and systems change only after the person leading them has been changed. The commitment he was asking for, he said, was personal and specific. "Don't just say, 'All my church' or 'My denomination,'" he told delegates. "Specifically the name of the church or the name of the community that you commit in the next 12 months before God."
"It's symbolic," Budijanto said, "but the commitment is before God." He asked them to pray for courage, for favor, and for the willingness to pay the full cost — in time, in sacrifice, in personal investment — that genuine transformation would require. "Pour your blood, your sweat, your tears," he said, "to help the church move into a disciple-making church."
The ACCM 2026 was organized by the Asia Evangelical Alliance in collaboration with the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, and was hosted by Greenhills Christian Fellowship South Metro in Alabang, Metro Manila. It marks the third in a series of gatherings under the "Disciple or Die" banner, following the AEA's 2024 General Assembly in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and the 2025 Asian Evangelical Leadership Forum near Seoul, South Korea.
