Dr David Sumrall gave us an insight into the spiritual giants in his lineage and what it was like to watch God at work in the Philippines. Photos by Michael Chan.
Dr David Sumrall, pastor of the Cathedral of Praise in Manila, the Philippines, grew up in the poorest part of Michigan in America. That experience later translated into a love to reach families deep in poverty.
“My parents were divorced when I was 3 and back then, the children went with the mother. She never worked and we lived on welfare. I basically supported myself, selling newspapers and stuff until the police sent me to live with my father when I was 14 because I was in too much trouble,” he shared.
Dr Sumrall comes from a rich lineage of spiritual giants. His granduncle, Dr Lester Sumrall was a well-known Pentecostal pastor, evangelist, teacher, and missionary who founded the Lester Sumrall Evangelistic Association and COP. His grandfather, Ernest Sumrall, was one of the pioneers of the Assemblies of God, and the pastor of Stone Church in Chicago.
“Grandpa was the pastor and Uncle Lester was the man of faith. So, I’m kind of a combination. Grandpa taught me how to write sermons, how to preach, how to pastor; Uncle Lester taught me how to live by faith,” he said with fondness.
However, Dr David Sumrall did not meet the Lord until he was in the university and heard the American contemporary Christian group, Truth. It was at a dinner with the band when it hit him that the singer of the group was living a much happier life than he was, even though he was “a prosperous young man”, and the singer was not.“He was happy and I wasn’t. That just got me some insights,” he recalled.
Dr Sumrall eventually gave his heart to God at 18, “and it’s been wonderful ever since,” he said, smiling.
He recalled how he would study the Bible with his grandfather after he received Christ. “Grandpa taught me to preach because every time I was home from school, Grandpa would sit down with me at the dining tables, and we’d study together. And we spent five or six hours every day doing that. I learned to pray sitting outside my grandfather’s door and listening to him pray.”
Dr Sumrall was invited to preach in City Harvest Church over the weekend of 27 and 26 Apr. He sat down with City News to share what it feels like to watch God transforming lives from the front row.
What was your relationship with your Uncle Lester like?
I didn’t even actually meet Uncle Lester until I was already in the ministry, graduated from Bible college and about to take my first position as a youth pastor in Chicago.
When I first met Uncle Lester, he found out that I had a call on my life and I graduated from Bible college. So, he asked me to come on staff as a youth pastor. I still laugh about it because I looked at him and said, “You made it on your own, I’ll make it on my own.” He looked at me, laughed, and he said, “You are a Sumrall.”
But we stayed in touch but we only got close after I got to the Philippines.
Everybody sees him as this big, strong, gruff guy—he could be that, but I remember him as a very gentle man who loved to play with his grandchildren. When I was sick one time, he sat for half a day with a cold cloth on my head and took care of me. He was a good, good guy.
What led you and your wife Beverly to the Philippines in 1980?
My wife and I did a crusade for his (Lester Sumrall’s) church. It was the funniest thing: when we landed in the Philippines, my wife and I looked at each other, and said at the same time, “I feel like I’m coming home.” It was the weirdest feeling. It was the first time we’d ever been there and we felt like we were coming home.
The pastor, Pastor Morocco, was in the US at the time, so I started doing all the services. One of the old ladies in the church came up to me and said, “You are so anointed. I don’t understand a thing you say but you were so anointed.” (laughs) I preached way too fast.
Pastor Morocco was then asked to be the chaplain (in the US) and the congregation asked my wife and I to be their pastors. I was 23 and she was 22 and we felt God say yes, so we stayed. We had no money, we had no support, and we weren’t missionaries, but we figured, “Well, God provided for us in America, God can provide for us here in the Philippines.”
The first 20 years were tough, but we’re very blessed now.
What were your early years in Manila like? Did you have a culture shock when you first arrived?
Not really, because when I got sent by the police to live with my dad in Alabama, we went to live in a place called Spanish Fort, just outside of Mobile Bay, Alabama. The people there were very friendly. They were basically seafood eaters, rice eaters, very kind and gracious country people and, to be honest, very much Filipino. The family that I grew up with there was generational, so there was no difference. There was no big culture shock for us.
Did you have a clear plan for the church when you started?
I had no idea, so I used to tell God, “I know how to pray. I know how to study the Bible, but that’s all I know.” And God was gracious.
When my wife and I agreed to pastor the church, we said we’d stay for one year until God sent a real pastor. It was not a long-term plan. But God never sent a “real pastor.” God changed me and gave me a pastor’s heart. I love to visit people, families.
The congregation grew rapidly after you and Sister Beverly took leadership, and you started many new and fruitful works like Bible study, the Bible Institute and the Christian TV programme. What do you believe is the reason for this continual growth in COP, which is now the largest church in Metro Manila?
We grow our church by evangelism. Once a year, we do a “harvest visit” in the church members’ homes to get their relatives, friends and neighbours saved.
Right now, we have a small truck that can be converted into a portable platform. We would do crusades on basketball courts. We’re buying a bigger one so that we can reach 30,000 people at a time. We are in offices, universities, high schools, and the military. We work very, very hard at evangelism and I don’t mind filling up other churches. Not everybody is going to come to us.
We love to pray. We have our Friday all-night prayer meetings about once a quarter. We have morning prayer meetings on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We love the word, we have a Bible college. I learned many years ago, from Tommy Reed, who was on the CGI (Church Growth International) board when I first joined, that we have to start our own Bible college so that nobody can ruin our good students. He said, “You can’t send your young people to Bible schools where they are trained by a teacher because everything reproduces after its own kind. They’re only going to reproduce Bible school teachers. If they’re trained in the local church by pastors, then you’re reproducing pastors.”
What is unique about ministering in the Philippines? What do you feel is God’s heart for the Philippines?
Uncle Lester always felt—and it’s something that God spoke to us in the 1980s—that the Philippines would be the springboard to Asia. So we worked very hard at giving our people a vision. Little did we know that our people would be working all over the world today. So after coming out of all the economic crisis of the ’80s and the ’90s, and getting everything done and all the debts paid off at the church, we’re seeing that fulfilled now. We’re opening churches all across Asia.
I used to preach in Tagalog. I preach in English now but it’s to help the members. I’m doing a series on what got David noticed and how he moved from his anointing into his destiny. One of the things that got him noticed was he spoke well. Daniel had to learn the culture and the language of the Babylonians. We have 180 dialects and languages in the Philippines but English is the only lingua franca. If I only spoke Tagalog and our church just became a Tagalog church, I couldn’t reach the rest of the country. And I couldn’t send pastors around the world.
In the early 80s, the three major dialect groups fought each other and one of the things we tried to do was stop the regionalist mentality in the church. So let’s all speak English to each other, so I don’t have different groups refusing to sit next to one another.
When I went to the Philippines, we were 60 million people and there were a few big churches. Forty-five years later, we’re 104 million people, but we don’t have that many more people in church. I don’t think we’re getting ahead; I think we’re falling behind.
We have to evangelise and in these next years of my life, my focus is on opening new churches and evangelising. For 45 years, what have we accomplished? I sat there one day in prayer and said, “Lord, you know, we haven’t succeeded at this point.” Percentage-wise, there are fewer born-again Christians today than there were in 1980. And I’m not criticising anybody else for that, I’m criticising myself. Let’s work harder at evangelism. And let’s work harder at opening new churches and going into cities.
In the Philippines, a big church from Manila will go into a provincial city, gather all the wealthy people together and start a church. They’ve taken all the blessing out of all the other churches and just congregate them over there. What I do, is to go into the cities and open a church, but I also want to fill up all their churches. We do that by setting up crusades in the cities we go into. We work with the pastors and we help fill up all their churches. We also open churches.
A lot of these pastors in the province have nobody to help them. They have a church of maybe 75 or 80 people and they’re barely surviving financially. But if I can go in and fill up their building, and now they have 200 people. Now that the church is in good condition, it has a future.
I read about the Revival of May of 1995 where the outpouring of the Holy Spirit changed lives and restored relationships. Sicknesses and diseases were healed, the blessings of God flowed, and crusades and overseas outreaches started. How did that revival come to be?
I was going to do a conference in the South headed by Frank Bailey. The year before, he had done the largest cell group conference in the US and I was going as their main speaker. He called me one day and said, “I’ve cancelled the conference.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Oh, I’ve just had this encounter with the Holy Spirit.” And I said, “Frank, how irresponsible.” (laughs)
I had none of the right responses. I went there to see him and he had changed. I mean, he had really changed. Frank and I have known each other for a long time and we were two guys who were so intense. But as you can see, the revival changed me too. When I went there, he would just sit there and talk about Jesus and Jesus was so real to him. He asked me to join him at the morning prayer the next morning. I said, “Sure.”
We met at morning prayer, and Frank walked up and laid his hand on me. In those days, I was not a happy laughy person—I was intense, focused, intellectual—and God just filled me with joy. And I remember hiding in the bathroom in New Orleans airport, just laughing my head off. The rest of that trip, every time I was alone, I’d be off in this vision of this crystal clear living river.
I got home and told the staff about it and it was like a fire went through the whole office. In those days, our office was in the mezzanine, in a circle. It was like a fire started where I was standing and just knocked everybody out. That started four years of nightly services—services seven days a week.
The building was half finished then and we were up to our eyeballs in debt. The interest rates were 40-something percent. We were a train wreck and under so much pressure. All of a sudden, when the river began to flow, finances began to flow. The building was finished, all the debts were paid off and people’s lives were changed. Marriages were changed.
Those were very beautiful days. It was messy—revival is always messy—but I don’t make any apologies for those days. But there came a point when God said now rebuild the theological foundations. So, I started a five-year series on the book of Romans to rebuild the theology of the church. We’ve had so much of the Holy Spirit, so it was time to rebuild the theology of the church and move forward.
You have led COP for 40 years and this year is its 70th anniversary! Looking back, what do you think God created COP to do? What has been the greatest impact of COP in Manila and other parts of the Philippines and beyond?
I’ve had many people try to force me to sell our property because it’s worth a bucket of money but I just felt like God wants us to stay there. Because in that place, he breaks poverty off people. You see the poverty in our nation, and you see what happens when people get saved.
Sin’s expensive. There’s an automatic gospel lift that comes into people after salvation. Then you see God beginning to bless the work of their hands and you see families just thrive. I can walk you through the church and show you families that used to have three people living in one square meter space. When you visit them, you stand outside. And you see them now with their own homes, and their families put together.
Poverty is the ruin of the poor, so we have big feeding programmes. We feed over 2,000 children every single day. Our members are very involved in that but it’s taking people out of their sin and out of the destructiveness of sin, and then we see their lives changed.
We’d go in there and start a feeding programme. We get their kids into the feeding programme and then we’d visit the parents and get them saved—usually single mums. Then, we begin to see them take steps. Firstly, they get their first little business—one dad has a tricycle and he starts earning for the family—and we watch the progress. I love that. Maybe because I grew up so poor in Michigan, and I understand what poverty is like.
In our church, we have many second and third generations who grew up in church because of their parents. How can they have their encounters with God and not live in the shadow of what the earlier generation has done?
I didn’t grow up in church. I didn’t start going to church with Grandpa until after I got saved. My wife, however, grew up her whole life in church. She got called when she was 6 years old. She was the Timothy of the largest church in Vancouver of her generation, so she gets mad at me sometimes when I get upset with the young people growing up in church. “Where’s your fire?” “Where’s your zeal?”
Each young person has to be doing things for the right reason, it has got to be in their heart. The only way I know how to tell people is that they need their own encounters. It’s like Jacob. I taught our young people a sermon on Jacob that I called, “My God”, where Jacob grew up here and all about God from Grandpa Abraham and Father Isaac. Finally, when Jacob’s out there on his own, all he has got is a staff. He’s deceived his father, was kicked out of home, and was the black sheep leaving. He went on to have an encounter with God and he said, “From this day forward, You will be my God.” Young people have to move from “This is my parent’s religion”, to “This is my God”, and that’s going to take an encounter with God.
