You probably don’t remember when your church’s anniversary is, do you? Unless of course you are from the Philippines. Filipinos know how to do celebrations — birthdays, going away parties, anniversaries. No one does it better than they do. Which is why I suppose church anniversaries are such a big deal. Tonight we will be celebrating the sixth anniversary of Pingkian Family Worship, the small community of faith that shares a name with our community in Quezon City.
Preparations have been going on for quite a while. Yesterday the decorating began. Because we are anticipating some guests we decided to rearrange the layout so the front will be at the side. A local politician loaned us a stage that she has in her storage room. The size of two sheets of plywood it stands along one side of the space. We have several benches the we placed in two rows right in front of the space. That leaves about 1.5 metres for the dancers! The theme is Simbalay, which is loosely translated as Worshipping at Home, so the decorations are based on a native house called a bahay kubo. The backdrop is a series of curtains and bamboo decorated with colourful native fans.
Each sub-group within the church will play a role: The women’s group will dance, the men’s group will sing, the youth will dance, we will have a couple of testimonies of thanksgiving to God, and a couple of families will sing. All of this, of course, will happen after the usual church service is finished. Our usual services follow a simple liturgy: Greeting, three or four praise & worship songs in either English or Tagalog, a time of corporate prayer, Pastor Renz will preach, and we’ll have a response song. Then the celebration will begin.
Right now I am hoping that the rains will stop. It’s really coming down. That’s the disadvantage of having a July anniversary in Manila — it’s rainy season. Earlier this afternoon, I was carrying our portable sound system down to where the service will be held. I had assumed the rain was finished but when I was halfway there the rains started again. Fortunately a local eatery has an overhang in front of it that I was able to use for cover. I only had to wait about 5 minutes before heading on my way again. The sun came out. The water started to dry up. And we were ready for the rest of the day. Then the rains began again. The thing about rain in Manila is that it comes hard for a short period of time and then is done. That’s what we are hoping for today too 🙂
Rain has messed with our plans in the past. A number of years ago, before we had our current facility, we had a rather elaborate setup using a tent. However, the rains meant we needed to move at the last minute. We ended up using our garage and the garage across the lane. We had chairs all the way across the street that needed to be moved in the middle of the service when one of the neighbours came home. It was reminiscent of the Christmas program we held one year where the neighbour carried a squealing pig past our setup because someone had bought it. It pays to not be too invested in make sure everything goes right 🙂
In the end it’s not the smoothness of the program that counts but rather the joy that we all shared in together as we prepared. God after all isn’t an event-based God but one that wants to meet us where we live everyday!
That all plants need water is something I have known my whole life but haven’t really experienced until this past few months. Saskatchewan is currently experiencing drought-like conditions and since we are staying at a farm we can see the effects first-hand.
Fortunately the farm has a pivot. A pivot is a large, elevated irrigation system designed to provide water to crops. A pivot is huge! It consists of a large 6-inch pipe about 6 metres off the ground. A series of wheels slowly move the pipe across the field, each rolling at a slightly different pace as it follows an arc across the field. It’s called a pivot because on end of the pipe is fixed to the ground and acts as the point around which the whole thing pivots. A large, elaborate pump supplies water to the pivot from a nearby lake. In the above picture, the white line extending across the field is the pivot. The darker curved lines are the tracks the wheels leave in the field.
Unfortunately the pivot hasn’t been working all that well for the past few years. It has a tendency to shut down automatically for mysterious reasons. After checking everything out multiple times the likely culprit is a problem in the electrical system. So while the pivot is a great idea, especially during times of drought, sometimes it doesn’t work all that well.
Pivot is a word we have seen a lot lately in the realm of ecclesiology. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of churches to evaluate how they deal with crises. Many say that churches need to learn how to pivot during times like this in order to survive. Churches that have a hard time with the pivot have a harder time adjusting to the changes.
Just as an irrigation pivot makes sure water gets to the whole field, so also a church that pivots makes sure the gospel gets to all of society. But sometimes adjustments need to be made. Which raises an issue when it comes to pivoting. Sometimes we need to change a part for it to work. What parts do I need to change or to switch out for something better?
I attended church for the first time last Sunday where there were no more restrictions. The government of Saskatchewan has decided that they will combat COVID-19 exclusively through vaccination. While there, I noticed a couple of pivots:
The pivot towards a paperless church that began with the pandemic has been maintained.
The pivot towards those little pre-packaged communion wafer and juice sets has now been pivoted away from back to real bread and those little plastic cups.
But I will say one thing. In spite of all my advocacy over the past months for embracing the virtual church, there are some things that are better done together. Specifically, not once while I was singing in the privacy of my own home, sitting in my comfortable easy chair, did I feel the urge to raise my hands but I certainly felt that while singing with the congregation on Sunday.
What things have you changed over the course of this pivot?
So, let’s talk about the church. What does church really mean? When it comes down to the idea of how we respond to COVID we have to realize that we’re talking about different aspects to church. We can look at the church as both gathered and scattered. Sometimes the church gathers together and sometimes the church is scattered and spread apart. Sometimes the church has both gathered and scattered aspects existing simultaneously. For example, sometimes a church has a Sunday-morning gathering, a weekly small group – known by various names including cell church, small group, Bible study, the life group, discipleship group, and more – as well as members who spend most of their time in their respective physical communities as well as their workplaces, homes, and selected third spaces. Sometimes the concept is explained using cells with single shell churches meeting Sunday mornings but multiple cell churches meeting anytime throughout the week. What all of this means is that there are multiple ways of understanding the concept of church.
But perhaps the most traditional model is the single cell model of a church that gathers on a Sunday morning in what is often called a congregation. This is actually not a traditional Philippine way of worship. Spain’s introduction of the concept of church to the Philippines involved a lot of reengineering of Philippine society. Spain used a colonial system called reducciones where they would gather scattered people into communities, called Poblacion or plaza complex in the Philippines. Here you have the church, the municipal Hall, and the market with people living in the surrounding blocks. The distance that you could be away from the church was restricted by the sound of the church bell. This is called baja de campana, or under the bell. If you could hear that bell ringing that would call you to mass then you were baja de campana. This identified you as a person submissive to the system. While the term baja de campana isn’t used as much today, this concept is still seen in the Parokya or parish where the church bell and mass are broadcast to the community on loudspeakers.
A New Normal, 500 Years Ago!
While this is normal in the Philippines today, 500 years ago it was a new normal. Prior to this, people lived wherever was convenient to them: Fishermen lived near their favorite fishing cove and farmers lived near their fields.
Spain came in and brought their system for not only colonization but also for evangelization, because the two are not much different.[1] Today we have other issues coming in, including public health concerns such as the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. These issues are creating a new normal that governs how society operates. Because of the public health crisis, we have developed this idea of virtual or online or live stream churches, whether these are services that we’re broadcasting, whether it’s praise and worship, that we’re broadcasting, whether it’s a new way of doing church online, or whether we’re just doing the same thing and recording it and broadcasting it, whether we’re using Zoom, Facebook Live, YouTube, Vimeo, or other things, and there’s a variety of other ways to interact where does this fit this virtual online church? Is this the church gathered? Is gathering a part of this online community when we’re gathered together on zoom? Is that a gathering? When we’re all watching doing a watch party together? Is that gathering? Is that scattered? Because the church can be gathered scattered? Is this cell a single cell or is it multiple cell? How does this all interact and work with each other? What does it all do?
Then you get to COVID-19 times where people can’t gather together. And we love to gather together. And it’s the gathering together in a sense that it’s the community of believers, in a sense, makes up the church, but we’ve conflated that with the facility within which we gather.
And so, when it comes to the point of gathering together, not being able to gather together for COVID, all of a sudden, the discussion goes to “Oh, well it’s religious persecution,” or some other kind of an issue. As if the only way that we know how to connect with God is inside a church building. But if we look at biblical and church histories of the way people have gathered, we realize that that’s not entirely the case.
It just means that our way of doing things may go through changes, just like the change from walking in the garden, to having to build an altar, to having to go to a tabernacle, to then having to go to a temple, to then doing a synagogue or a church. It’s just part of the transition and there’s been lots of “new normal” over time.
Philippine Religious Consciousnesses and Crisis Today.
Religious Space.
There’s no concept of religious space in the Philippines system because all space is religious space. This helps us particularly when we talk about issues of issues of religious liberty. Do I have the right to practice my religion and if the government tells me not to meet together, does that mean I’m not being able to practice that? these issues are sort of put aside, because there is really no specifically religious space. We’re used to worshiping in a church, but quite often in society, you’ll see a variety of different religious spaces that are used. You know, whether it’s a procession, where you’re going down the street and so the street becomes a religious space as you bring your as you bring your statue around the community. Even there’s what’s called the pabasa. During Holy Week. When the, the story of Jesus passion is, is, is, is sung in various parts of the community and so these homes and these different places become religious space because of the usage. There’s even the Stations of the Cross where religious spaces are temporarily set up in various parts of the community as people go around and pray as they remember Jesus’ passion. So religious space in the sense of here’s where we do religious activities and this space we don’t is not a concept that exists in the Philippines.
The first point we need to remember as we as we try to create a theology of crisis is that any space can be religious space — we don’t need to be fixated on a church building.
Church Leadership and the Filipino Family.
I guess the second point is that typically the pastor is seen as being in charge of the church. They provide leadership there, but what about inside the home? Who is the one who provides leadership there? It certainly isn’t the pastor.
As the story goes, the pastor visited a home at lunch time. In an effort to honour him they mother invited him in to eat. She had prepared a fish for lunch and the kids worriedly watched the pastor through the window as he tucked in to the meal. All of a sudden one of the kids yells, “Mom, he flipped the fish over!”
While the pastor may be a visitor to the house really the leadership of the home is provided by the father and the mother. And this leadership extends not simply to who feeds the kids and who does the laundry but it goes beyond that. Ultimately it is Who sets the rules? and Who shapes the future for the family? It’s the parents.
One way forward in the midst of crisis is to encourage, train, and empower parents to be the spiritual leaders of their families.
Dambana, or the family altar.
The third aspect would be the idea of dambana. Dambana is a is an old Filipino word that talks about a place where you encounter the divine, you know whether this is whether this is a space like a, like a building, whether this is an altar. But, but typically within a house, you know a lot of houses have the altar inside their house so there’s this religious space inside the house, that is that is devoted towards the worship of God and the connection proper connection and relationship with God. Quite often, of course in Filipino homes you’ll have a, you’ll have a, an image that’s that is in that spot, but you’ll also notice in many homes you’ll have other religious artifacts such as Bibles and other things that are there. And these are these are just to remind everybody that God is always present with us. And so within, within each house you have this religious space.
We can use these concepts. As we move towards developing a theology of crisis, a theology of lockdown a theology of pandemic. Rather than trying to find theological reasons for convincing the government to let us reopen our church buildings, we can help encourage and empower families to be responsible for their own spiritual development inside of their homes. During this time, and maybe this will expand them beyond that into the time after the pandemic whatever it will look like.
The “seen zone” is a way for virtual gatherings to approximate face-to-face gatherings.
Facebook has a feature on their messenger app that allows people to see if messages have been sent, received, and read. Simply by looking at the small circle under your message on the right side of the screen will tell you this. An empty circle means the message is sending, a clear blue circle with a checkmark means that the message has been sent to the Facebook server, a filled-in blue circle means the message has been delivered to the intended recipient, and a circle with a tiny profile pic means that your message has been seen by the intended recipient(s).Â
Maybe you haven’t even noticed these small circles but they do teach us an important lesson about gathering and community.
What is a simple and helpful tool takes on special meaning among certain demographics. Because, you see, what happens after a message has been seen is also important. If the message has been seen but there is no immediate reply forthcoming the sender is now in what is called the “seen zone.” Depending on the seriousness of the conversation this can either fill you with joy — ala “They saw my message” — to anger — ala “Why haven’t they replied yet?”
While this may be annoying — sometimes after all you want to remain anonymous — it is a way for virtual conversations to imitate face-to-face conversations more closely. After all, keeping a message in the “seen zone” is akin to not talking to someone in a face-to-face gathering. In either case, the social implications can be huge.Â
What aspects of virtual interaction make you feel more comfortable? Less comfortable? What make you feel like gathering has happened?
Michael J. Fast 