The Samoan-American ‘Jesus Freak’ with a huge heart – and family of twenty-six to go with it. The extraordinary story of Chaz Yandall and his outreach to the orphaned and abandoned children of the Philippines.
Samoan-American Chaz Yandall was once a “Jesus Freak” but now he’s a missionary to the Philippines where, along with his wife Terrie, continues to care his ever-growing extended family.
I met up with Chaz at the recent Festival of Life 2007 led by Mike MacIntosh and being held in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the picturesque capital of Chiapas, and he agreed to talk about his extraordinary life and his work with children in the country he has lived in for the past sixteen years.
Chaz began by sharing about his childhood. “I grew up in a very devout Roman Catholic family, knowing about God, but not necessarily knowing about my need for that personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Even though I was an altar boy through high school, I was not living according to what the Scriptures would have me do and, after I graduated from high school in Michigan at the age of sixteen, I got in my car and drove all the way to California.“
“My parents come from Samoa, a small island in the south Pacific and they moved to America and lived in Michigan where it is very cold during the winter and so I ended up in sunny San Diego where I had a brother living there.
“While there, I learned how to surf and started working in the surfing industry as well as studying to go into the Air Force. One of the people who worked for me was a young Filipino man and one day he decided to be bold and ask me to go to church with him. I had not set foot in a church since I left my home back in Michigan and so I said, ‘That might be kind of fun.’
He took me to a church called Horizon South Bay in the southern part of San Diego. There I saw people going happily smiling into church and they were carrying Bibles. It was something totally foreign to me and the time of music was fantastic and then when the man taught from the Word he was encouraging us all to ‘make sure’ what he was teaching was right and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really unique.’
“His message turned around and he asked, ‘Have you dealt with the issue of your own personal sin?’ I realized that I hadn’t and I went forward at the alter call was on the floor sobbing like a baby which, being six foot four Samoan, that was obviously something that was not natural. It was something that the divine Spirit of God was doing in my life. That was in 1985 and when I began my journey with God.”
I asked him what his family thought of his conversion.
“I was so excited that when I got home I called my mother and my father back in Michigan to tell them that I was ‘saved’ and ‘born again’ and immediately my mother began crying and handed the phone to my father. I could hear them talking in the background and then my father got on the phone and said, ‘Your mother told me that you just did this. Is that correct?’ I said, ‘Yeah, Dad, it’s great.’ He then said, ‘You’re no son of mine,’ and hung up the phone. That just devastated me.”
Chaz said that after his conversion, he began attending one of the Horizon churches in San Diego and worked for the high school ministry for four years. He married his girlfriend, Terrie, and they soon had three children.
The “call” to the Philippines began take shape when many of the men who had gone with Mike MacIntosh to participate in the first Festival of Life in that country in Manila and also the city of Bacolod.
“I didn’t go, but a bunch of our friends went,” said Chaz. “There were about three-hundred people from the church that went on that festival and they all came back saying what a great ministry opportunity it was and telling me that they were going to quit their jobs and move there.
“I told them that I wasn’t going to quit my well paying job in the surfing industry, my home, and at the age of twenty-four, take my wife and three kids to the Philippines. I felt that I was a success story and I didn’t plan to give all that up.
“However, over the course of six months, my wife began to ask me, ‘Honey, are you hearing anything from God about the Philippines?’ We had heard Mike MacIntosh share from the pulpit about an opportunity to go back and help the kids in Bacolod. After about six months of her asking me that same question, gently, nicely, peacefully, I discovered that not a single one of my friends had quit their jobs and moved to the Philippines.
“One day, I heard that still small voice of God saying to me, ‘I have given you everything you’ve ever wanted and now I’m asking for you in return to give it back and understand that you can either give it to me willingly or I can take it away.”
Chaz said he finally began to seek God’s guidance on this matter and He asked the Lord prove Himself. “In 1989, I was reading my Bible and it fell open to James, chapter one. “I started reading I got down to verse twenty- seven where it says, ‘Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’
“When I read the word ‘orphans’ it was like it became a neon sign to me. “I knew the church was looking for somebody to go out and help orphan kids and I just started weeping knowing that this was what I had to do.”
Strangely, Chaz revealed that was his wife that began training for the mission field at the Horizon School of Evangelism in San Diego. She was by now pregnant with their fourth children and so he went along with her to the Philippines for her practicum.
“When I first flew into Manila, I thought, ‘Lord, what did we get ourselves into?’ If you haven’t lived in a city of over twenty-million people, you’re just overwhelmed at just the masses of humanity that you see. We were in Manila for about two weeks and then our team headed to Bacolod which I thought would be like the jungles of Africa.
“So as we’re flying into Bacolod, I was surprised to see lots of concrete and streets laid out below in a grid formation and then I started to see two and three story buildings. Then, as we were driving in to the city, sure enough was a big sign announced that McDonald’s was about to be built there.”
Eventually, the Yandall family moved to Bacolod and began to try and help meet the needs of orphaned and abandoned children there. But they got off to a bad start. Their savings began to diminish and soon they had practically nothing left to live off.
“For the first six months, things that were supposed to be provided through some local contacts didn’t pan out so we were living in a hotel,” Chaz explained.
“Then, once our finances got down below where we couldn’t live in the hotel any more, we began living in the servant’s quarters of another missionary’s house. So here I was with my pregnant wife and three kids and the servant’s quarters were just big enough for us at night to lay down four mattresses in the room. All of us kind of slept on the four mattresses.
“As time went on, it got to a point where, in my youthful arrogance and immaturity in Christ, I just cried out to God and said, ‘Lord, I’ve had enough of this. I’m not going to eat another meal in this house until You provide for us.’ Looking back at it now, I can imagine the Lord looking down from heaven saying, ‘OK, go ahead.’
“Two weeks later, God provided. Had He not provided, then probably within the next weeks we would have gotten on a plane home to nothing, the whole time, God was allowing all these things to happen to me to break me and learn how to pick up the cross and continuing on just like Jesus did, continuing on.”
Chaz saw the irony of him bringing his family to the Philippines so he and Terrie could help disadvantaged children, saying, yet he couldn’t properly care for his own during those early months there.
As life began to turn around for Chaz and his family, their work started in earnest with a Children’s Crisis Center. “What happens in the Philippines is that women get pregnant out of wedlock and then the ‘love of their lives’ bails on them and leaves. So now you’ve got a young girl who’s pregnant or has the baby already and can’t get work because she’s got to take care of the baby. Nice thing about the Roman Catholic background there is that at least, when women get pregnant, abortion isn’t the first thought, like in the United States.
“Children born out of wedlock aren’t exactly welcomed into the community or by their family, so they’re kind of on their own. Soon mother’s were bringing their children to use and asking us if we would take care of them ‘for a while.’ We found out over the course of the next couple of years that all of those young women never come back.
“So now we’ve got these little children and our own infant as well. From the very beginning we wanted those children to have a stable environment, a home so our biological children and they, could share rooms from the beginning. So, as these little babies who were left, continued to get older they started calling us ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy,’ because that’s what our own children called us.”
So now the Yandall’s have a house full of their owned children and also these abandoned kids, and they began to explore if they could legal adopt the abandoned children.
“At that time, it was illegal for foreigners living within the country to adopt. So I prayed, ‘Lord, You brought us here. You gave us these children and they’re calling us ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ and we’re going to treat them like that because we are here for a long time because and we can’t take them anywhere. Lord it’d be so cool if they’d changed the adoption laws and allowed us to adopt them.”
Well, that eventually occurred and this meant that a foreigner who had lived for more than three years in the Philippines could now adopt like a natural citizen of the country.
“Now, we are in the process of adopting twenty children and adding them to our six natural children. So I’m a father of twenty-six. We’ve completed five of the adoptions and we are in the court for four more, and when that’s done we’ll go with eleven more and we’ll be done with that aspect of life. Our adopted children range from eight to twenty.”
Besides his work with the children, Chaz is also now the pastor of Horizon Bacolod and is also deeply involved in broadcasting in his adopted city.
“For the past six years I’ve been also involved in a broadcasting ministry called ‘Sinbad’s Galley’ which is a contemporary Christian music show that we do on a secular FM radio station,” he explained. “I present it on Saturday and Sunday mornings and I’m like a normal DJ, but I play Godly music and I give short segments of spiritual encouragement in between songs.
“I also have a Bible Answer type of program where for 30 minutes I play the teachings of Chuck Smith and then I take Bible questions from listeners for the second half hour. We have been doing that now for about nine months.”
Life has come along way for this Samoan-American “Jesus Freak” who now has a unique and loving ministry to so many in the Philippines. (Dan Wooding, ASSIST Ministries)
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