LAMSUGOD, Philippines—The last time Tim Tebow visited his father’s orphanage here in the remote hills of Mindanao island, he stood at the edge of a grassy yard and told the children to make a loop with their arms. Then, to their amazement, he threw a football right through them.
“He’s really good at throwing!” said the Rev. Roberto P. Gauran, 67, who runs the orphanage with his wife, Raymunda, 65. “At 30 meters, he could hit dead center, or even farther.”
That was three years ago, before Tebow’s professional stardom cut down on his time for travel to the Philippines. But the boys and girls here still toss around a football he left behind for them—among the very few youngsters in the country who know how.
[Tim is a football quarterback for the New York Jets of the US National Football League. Formerly a star of the Denver Broncos, he is known for his public display of Christianity, called “Tebowing,” where he would kneel in prayer each time he led the Broncos to a miraculous win.—Inquirer Archives]
“Kuya Timmy taught us how to throw it,” said Jessa Berbo, 16. The word at the orphanage is that Tebow himself singled her out as the child with the best arm.
Tebow’s father, Bob, founded the orphanage in 1992 as part of his missionary work in the Philippines with the Bob Tebow Evangelistic Association, headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. He visits several times a year, sometimes bringing with him American volunteers to preach in distant towns and villages.
On a recent visit, Bob Tebow showed the children a video of his son on the field and the orphans watched with a mixture of excitement and puzzlement, said Roberto Gauran Jr., 28, the oldest of the pastor’s seven children, who also works here.
“The children here know he is famous, but we don’t play football in the Philippines and sometimes we don’t know what is going on,” he said. “We watch Fox News sometimes, so we know what is happening in the States with Tim and we know that people are mocking him for his faith.”
But most Filipinos, obsessed with basketball rather than football, have not heard of Tim Tebow, or of his father’s foundation. His name rang a bell with one academic who said, “Oh, is he the one who puts biblical verses under his eyes?”
‘Like our own kids’
Although the children at the orphanage do know about him, none of them seemed to have heard about Tebowing.
(In the Philippines, the rage is for “Noynoying,” an apparent copycat sendup of President Aquino, whose nickname is Noynoy, in which people lean their heads on a hand in a gesture of indecisiveness.)
The orphanage, called Uncle Dick’s Home, now shelters about 40 children who attend nearby rural elementary and high schools, and includes a dormitory for about 10 who have enrolled in a small college, Mrs. Gauran said.
“When we take in the children we intend to raise them until they graduate from college and go out into the world,” Bob Tebow said in a telephone interview. “We like to treat them as closely as we can like our own kids. Our plan is to keep doing the same thing, to get more children and keep raising them up.”
‘Special’
Uncle Dick’s Home, named for a close family friend, is clean but spare in this very poor part of the Philippines. Its grounds are lush with foliage and filled with birdsong and the sometimes earsplitting buzz of tropical cicadas.
On a long quiet afternoon recently some of the children clustered on two hammocks and a broken couch under the trees, swinging and listening to a small transistor radio. A water buffalo grazed just beyond the gate.
Not far away, in a reminder of America’s dominant historical presence in the Philippines, vast Dole pineapple plantations stretch across the plains toward the mountains.
“I truly believe that the God who loves me also looks at orphans as extremely special,” Tim Tebow writes in his autobiography, “Through My Eyes,” written with Nathan Whitaker. “Over and over, my parents showed us how the Bible talks about taking care of widows and orphans.”
Miracle baby
Tim Tebow was born in Makati City in 1987 and lived there until he was 3 years old. Since the age of 15 he has made a number of visits back and has now established the Tim Tebow Foundation. In addition to its evangelical work in the United States, his foundation plans to build a 30-bed children’s hospital in Mindanao’s largest city, Davao.
Tim’s difficult birth has become part of the Tebow story, when, according to his family, his mother rejected a doctor’s suggestion that she terminate the complicated pregnancy and delivered what she now calls a “miracle baby.”
“We never thought Timmy would go that high in sports,” Gauran said. “God trained him to be a preacher. I think he is just setting this foundation for a ministry. Perhaps that time will come when football will be on the sidelines for him.”
Gospel of Jesus
In an interesting twist, the Bob Tebow foundation is bringing its message, in large part, to Christians.
The foundation’s website, which provides a link for online donations to support its work, states that its mission is “to take the gospel to those who have never heard and plant Bible-believing churches where previously there were no churches.”
It goes on to say: “In a country of 92,000,000, it is estimated that over 65,000,000 Filipinos have never once heard the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
But according to the most recent census, more than 80 percent of Filipinos are Roman Catholic. Another 3 percent are evangelical Christians and 7 percent belong to other Christian sects. Muslims and smaller groups make up the remainder of the population.
A large portion of the Muslim minority lives in Mindanao, but South Cotabato province, the center of Bob Tebow’s work, is mainly Catholic. The foundation says it has deployed some 50 Filipino missionaries to preach in every village in the country.
Easy acceptance
American Protestant missionaries have been challenging the Catholic establishment, fostered by Spanish colonialists, since the United States seized the Philippines from Spain in 1898.
Asked about this largely Christian audience for his evangelical work, Bob Tebow quoted the Bible as saying it is the duty of every Christian to “preach the gospel to everybody.”
He made reference to the book of Matthew 28:19-20, which reads, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I command you.”
In any case, proselytizing like this appears generally to be taken with an easy acceptance in a country that has been familiar with religious missionary work since Spanish colonialists first brought Catholicism in the 16th century.
Welcoming society
“The church doesn’t feel threatened,” said Randy David, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines and whose brother is a Catholic bishop. “It’s a very dominant institution. You go to any church on Sunday and they are packed. I’ve never seen more people inside the churches.”
He added: “I think, to my surprise, the Philippines has become one of the more welcoming societies with regard to religious pluralism.”
Bob Tebow’s missionary work brought him in 1985 to Mindanao, where he settled with his wife, Pam, and four children, two years before Tim was born. He has continued the mission since the family returned to the United States in 1999.
He has set a rigorous standard for his son’s evangelical work, ready to go anywhere and meet anyone, in formal or informal settings, in large groups or small, to spread the message, Gauran said.
Even in dangerous places
“Even on the bus,” the pastor said. “He’ll just stand up and preach while we are moving and he invites the passengers to accept Jesus Christ. Or if he sits in a public place and somebody is beside him, he will ask him, ‘Do you know Jesus Christ?’ and he will deal with him.”
Often, he has traveled with Gauran to what the pastor called “the remotest places in the country and sometimes very dangerous places” to find new audiences for his message.
On one trip, the pastor said, a boy warned them that a group of men were planning to kidnap them for ransom. “They chased us maybe 5 kilometers,” he said. “Fortunately, Bob is a really good driver … and we were able to get away.”
Tebow brushed aside the dangers. “I was never concerned about my safety,” he said. “I don’t regard it as particularly dangerous to obey Jesus Christ and do what he wants you to do. How are you threatened if you have eternal life?”
Despite warnings from the military and from local residents, Gauran said, they always pushed ahead.
“He said, ‘If they kill me, that’s it,’” the pastor said. “‘If they kidnap me, that’s my chance to preach to them.’”
