In this paper, I propose discussing mission through the liturgical approach i.e.
the renewal of worship. Worship remains elemental in the praxis of mission – as a symbolic rehearsal and consecration of missionary work. Within the rubrics of liturgy and missions, the praxis of mission also shifts from its colonialist orientation toward a more liberating direction that proceeds from the people at the bottom. Being a theology in motion, a liturgy renewed can serve as a theological prologue to the re-routing and praxis of missions. Succinctly put, the praxis of worship is a preparation for a missiological self-understanding.
This discussion proceeds from a re-thinking of worship life vis-à-vis the theology and diaconal commitments of Christians as informed or framed by the Trinitarian affirmation of the church. The pastoral setting of this review is a people’s struggle, i.e. the Filipinos’ pakikibaka (struggle) for a fuller humanity, specifically as ritualized in protest mobilizations. What this essay attempts to contribute is a review of a central credo of the church as a frame of or resource for liturgical reflection on the Filipino life-rite (also popularly framed as the passion, death and resurrection of the Filipino people). Progressively, this builds up into a discussion of the church’s credal affirmations and its implications for worship renewal in particular – and the liturgy and missions in general.
The worship of the Triune God We believe
In One God: Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, who provides order, purpose, meaning and fufillment to all creation.
That in Jesus Christ, who is born of Mary, God became human and is sovereign Lord of life and history.
That in the Holy Spirit God is present in the world, empowering and guiding believers to understand and live out their faith in Jesus Christ.1
The formula of the Christian creed of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, a member church of the United Evangelical Mission, opens with an affirmation of God as “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.” In the light of a people’s struggle in a precariously idolatrous location, it is absolutely essential, first and foremost, to affirm God as both the subject and object of the liturgical act.2 It needs reiteration that the renewal of worship is a public affirmation of a decision for God over and against submission to the reign of the mammon-god.
Presently, the latter is inundating both the corporeal and ethereal realms, building for itself a domain that poses as a political competitor to the vision of God’s reign. As a cultus of God’s reign, worship is directly faced with this confrontational reality of mammon. The praise of God needs to take shape, as Brueggemann puts it, ‘as a doxology against idolatry and ideology.’3
More than being the first of the six articles constituting the statement of faith of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, the affirmation of God as the Trinity also establishes an interpretative principle for the faith. The Trinity remains the fundamental grammatical frame through which the Christian community interprets the reality of God.4 The church views the work of God, and that of missions, from a narrative of relationship defined by the Trinity. But how to communicate an ancient and complex Hellenic doctrinal formulation as the Trinity remains a task essential to enhancing the dynamism and relevance of the Christian faith today. In an attempt to state more clearly this mystery of a three-in-one divinity, the Trinity Working Group of Presbyterian Church - USA states:
We have come to believe that no name, no metaphor, no set of words or phrases – however thoughtful, poetic or profound – will ever be able to say everything that could be said about the mystery of God’s love made known to us above all in Jesus Christ and sealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.5
1 The United Church of Christ in the Philippines’ Statement of Faith.
2Marva J. Dawn, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time. Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1995, p.75ff.
3 The very title of Brueggeman’s review of Sigmund Mowinkle’s seminal work on the psalms. Brueggemann, Walter. Israel’s Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology.
Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1988.
4 Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God. London: SCM Press 1981, pp.61ff.
5 See The Trinity working Group of the Presbyterian Church-USA, The Trinity: God’s Love Overflowing: A Preliminary Report to the 216th General assembly of PC-USA, 2004, pp.3-4.
Nonetheless, the said body came up with a description that it says is profoundly scriptural and rooted in tradition – the Trinity is the ‘God who is love overflowing’:
‘God’s Love Overflowing’ is our attempt to express the amazing riches that flow boundlessly from the triune God who in loving freedom seeks and saves us, reconciles and renews us, and draws us into loving relationships that reflect the eternal oneness of God.6
Furthermore, in Asian commentaries on the Trinity as God’s love story with God’s creation, another Presbyterian, a Taiwanese engaged in the reconstruction of theology with Asian resources, had been earlier meditating on the far more expansive ‘non-Trinitarian’ scenarios of God’s love.7 Using the lenses of the East Asian ‘third eye’, C.S. Song wrote of Asian stories as also theatres of God’s redemptive love for beyond the geo-historical and storycal confines of classical Trinitarian confession, the love of God also gushes out, giving birth to other stories and faith communities. Whence the classical
‘Father / Creator, Son / Redeemer and Holy Spirit / Sustainer’ naming of God is not exhaustive of the YHWH reality. The Trinity is a redemptive, incarnational, and sanctifying force of life bounded only by God’s creative power.
Moreover, the Trinitarian way of understanding God is a built-in corrective to Christian theological dogmatism, including pigeon-holed Trinitarianism. It is itself a theological argument against the ‘friends of Job’-like complacency of theological establishments. God’s freedom as expressed in God’s creative love is what demolishes the limiting anthropocentric (meaning, centered on what is directly useful to the human) orientation of both humanist and conventional theological wisdom.8 The Trinity points beyond itself. It points, essentially, to God’s freedom, and the experience of that freedom in and through God’s participation in human life and creation. God’s freedom in the Trinity is what opens up theology to peoples’ local dramaturgies. This divine freedom is centrally embodied in the passion of Christ, and God’s continuing creative work in the Spirit.
6 Op cit., p.32.
7 Choan-Sen Song, Third-Eye Theology: Theology in Formation in Asian Settings.
Guilford: Lutterworth Press 1970. In this book, Choan-Sen Song makes use of the Japanese Zen master Suzuki’s teaching on the ‘third eye’ – the intuitive (non-conceptual, non-rational) eye that envisions realities beyond the familiar.
8 Gutierrez, Gustavo. On Job: God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. New York:
Orbis 1987, pp.77-79 and 89.
God’s freedom in the passion of Christ
God’s freedom, the ‘divine passion’ as witnessed in the Hebrew Scriptures9 became flesh in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus. This “free relationship of passionate participation”10 initiated by God is what sums up the Christian gospel as well as what unravels the meaning of the Trinity. Now, what does this implosion of divine passion within the Godhead imply for worship? Specifically, what would this imply for the worship of subversive pilgrims, they whose leitourgia-mission is to bring about a new order?
Liturgically, God’s pasyon would also mean the freedom to take a deep plunge into the ritualizations of the marginalised. The masa of the margins may be inarticulate or inchoate, syncretistic, militant and formally inadequate in their ritualizations,11 but they are genuine in their cries for redemption. The marginals seek in their liturgical encounters the emancipation of their bodies and souls (i.e. in the external and internal dimensions of their being and becoming in the struggle).12 They speak the same language as those marginals and outcasts Jesus lived with in his time. Kristological worship is one that locates itself also in profane spaces, and specifically where the faith criss-crosses with revolutionary politics. Drawing from the fact of incarnation, the Iona Community, for example, believes and so states “that there is no part of life that is beyond the reach or outside the scope of faith. The word of life, which we attend to seek, discern and interpret in worship,” the community affirms, “is as much for our politics as for our prayers.”13
The sight of a resisting mass rallying around the iconic symbols of the Christian story emphasises how ‘God’s overflowing love’ is dug deep into the crevasses of the human situation. Kalbaryo ng Maralitang Taga-Lungsod (Calvary of the Urban Poor), an annual paraliturgy of Metro Manila’s resisting urban poor communities typifies that forlorn world God is being pulled into. It is one space where the church may overzealously protect God from, or one liturgical gathering that the church may choose to ignore with disdain. But the story of the incarnation suggests otherwise. What Kristology is meant to be and become [as visually illustrated in many of Emmanuel Garibay’s works] is precisely that of a liturgical relocation of the Christ into the struggle. One of the
9 Moltmann, op.cit p.75.
10 Moltmann, op.cit p.25.
11 As presented in Benigno Beltran, The Christology of the Inarticulate: an inquiry into the Filipino understanding of Jesus the Christ, Manila: Divine World Publications 1987.
12 Everett Mendoza. Radical and Evangelical: Portrait of a Filipino Christian. Quezon City: New Day Publishers 1999.
13 George McLeod as quoted in Kathy Galloway’s ‘The worship of the Iona Community’ in: Thomas Best and Dagmar Heller (eds.), Worship Today: Understanding Practice, Ecumenical Implications, Geneva: WCC Publications 2004, pp.222-228 and 228.
central liturgical icons of the Christian story was that of the Christ crucified between ‘two thieves’ in a desolate space outside established liturgical spaces.
Trinitarian worship is the encounter between God’s and suffering communities’ pasyones (passions) in Christ. Radically incarnational, spatial and political, such an encounter also takes place, literally, in garbage heaps.
The ‘Kristo’ is what places worship, not at the edge but at the centre, right in the grim squalor of the human condition. During the eighties and nineties, garbage heaps (bundok ng basura) like Smokey Mountain in Tondo, Manila were among the more popular images of suffering and resistance in the Philippines. The bundok ng basura, in fact, has become a favoured setting to several of the Kalbaryo ng Maralita (Kalbaryo) paraliturgies. It is the Kristological that mediates between the Christ in the grimness of every day resistance and the Christian. The urban poor’s Kalbaryo being a community rite may be inadequate, or worse, ‘utilitarian’ and ‘idolatrous’. But this needs to be assessed more from the perspective of the marginals than from the concern for the law and the preservation of the integrity of tradition. God in God’s participation in human life has decided to “employ humankind’s cultural forms and modes of expressions in spite of their manifest inadequacy to reveal Godself.”14
A Trinitarian worship is borderless and cannot be confined within the perimeter walls of imperial liturgiology. ‘Borderlessness’ in worship, however, is defined for the Filipino Christians by the Kristological, and thus looks at the incarnate Christ as its epitome of spiritual freedom.
God’s freedom in the Spirit
God’s freedom needs to be seen also as defined by the third person in the Godhead. In the New Testament, it is ‘in the Spirit’ that the church grew and expanded from Jerusalem to Judea and beyond. If Christ is the vertical breaking of space, it is ‘in the Spirit’ that the horizontal spatial boundaries are similarly collapsing. The two however are not separate outworkings of God’s grace, but a single reality within transformative human processes. It is also on this basis that liberation and inculturation need to be viewed as a single pastoral theological focus and task rather than two disparate if not contesting approaches to living out the faith in the world.
The freedom to explore potentials of and possibilities for the faith in various living contexts has drawn its inspiration mostly from the pneumatological in the Trinitarian economy. Contextualisation of the faith in contemporary multi-religious Asia, for example, has been more emphatic on the theme of the Spirit.
Tan Yun-Ka writes of the Pentecost event as an inspiration to the whole enterprise of ‘Asianising’ Christianity. Specifically on liturgical renewal,
14 See Tan Yun-Ka’s ‘Constructing An Asian Theology of Liturgical Inculturation’ from the Documents of the Federation of Asian Bishops Conference, 1999.
Pentecostal pneumatology, adds Tan Yun-Ka, is what makes Christianity more relevant to Asian realities.15
Asian theology and practical liturgiology have been very much grounded on the twin concerns of inculturation and liberation. This is reflected in the various modes of contextualisation that arose out of the process of ‘re-Asianising’
Christianity. For example, Jose de Mesa, a Filipino Jesuit theologian, blends everything that can be subsumed within Christian tradition, and liberation and inculturation concerns.16 Also, speaking on the theme of the World Council of Churches’ seventh assembly in Canberra, “Come Holy Spirit –Renew the Whole Creation,” Chun Hyun-Kyung, the Korean feminist theologian, called on the “use of the energy of the Holy Spirit” to build solidarity in the struggle to bring about a better quality of life.17 But what made her presentation controversial was her starting with a Korean harvest dance invoking the “spirits of the oppressed in history” using the Han (restless spirit) principle – calling them the “icons of the Holy Spirit.” In reply to charges of syncretism from a section of the Assembly, Chun argued for the case of a feminist, Third World and Asian Pentecostal theology:
We have been listening to your intellectualism for 2,000 years … listen to us for 200 years or if that is too long, 20 years. Is it not time to listen to our voices? We are new wine; you cannot put us into old skins. Yes, we are dangerous but it is through such danger that the Holy Spirit can renew the church.18
Worship ‘in the Spirit’ is a celebration of freedom in God. Freedom does challenge the borders of tradition if only to free the voices that have been repressed, caged and marginalised for so long. This is the broader political theological context of paraliturgies like the Kalbaryo or Chun’s theological liturgical performance. It is also ‘in the Spirit’ that ‘interconnectionalism’
supplants the ‘dualism’ that has kept the church ‘free’ and ‘safe’ from the world.19 With the Spirit bringing all spheres of the oikoumene together, the praxis of Christian freedom and leitourgia also converge. Chun’s dangerous pneumatological liaison with the edges in the quest for ecclesiastical reform is not an unfounded imperative in fundamental Protestantism. Everett Mendoza, for example, defines the Spirit-inspired freedom of the Christian as including:
the boldness to venture, everything that needs to be done. Because Christians have been freed from all kinds of work, they can dare to do any kind of work. … The
15 Ibid.
16 Stephen Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology: Revised and Expanded Edition.
Manila: Logos Publications 2003, pp.95ff.
17 CCA News, Volume 26. Number 1/2/3. January-March 1991, pp.16-18, 17.
18 Op.cit., p.18
19 Ibid.
freedom of the Christian is so radical that nothing but the conscience stands between him / her and a particular kind of work.20
Toward a Pentecostal liturgy of struggle
Asian churches’ pneumatological emphasis on the Trinity derives much of its inspiration from the Pentecostal experience of the ancient church. God’s freedom, empowering and activating presence were the basic elements in the Lukan account of the Pentecost event. A Pentecostal liturgy is hegemony-breaking language from and for God. It is a statement of faith that needs re-affirmation in situations where freedom and human rights are curtailed and the church hierarchy maintains its silence and apathy – if not fear – to speak out in public the subversive and ‘strange’ Word of God.
Moreover, a Pentecostal liturgy of struggle also builds on both the prophecy of Christ and the identity politics of Pentecostals.21 ‘Speaking in tongues’ is prophetic speech. It speaks languages other than the dominant one. The languages point to a world other than the present, or ‘kingdoms not of this world,’ indicting the ‘Babel’ humanity is building for its self-elevation. On the historical, practical level, ‘speaking in tongues’ is a lucid, even a literal case of a people’s insurrection and resurrection, of a people breaking free from the hegemonic language and culture of domination. It is ‘in the Spirit’ and in spiritualities of struggle that protest marches (rali), Mendiola (the popular site of protest in the Philippines), and other spatial icons constituting the dramaturgy of a people’s struggle are seen, for example, as integral to the Christian imagination. As suggested in Chung Hyun-Kyung’s assertions, the
‘icons of the Spirit’ are also the ‘strange tongues’ or the Christological that irrupts from outside and below resurrecting hope among those on the margins.
The evolving faith and spirituality of Pentecostal communities is another source of reflection for resistance liturgies. The Pentecostal experience can also be viewed as a liturgical phenomenon, and a considerable challenge to the praxis of liturgical reform in the ecumenical churches. It does not help that engaged Protestants dismiss them merely as “epiphenomenona of capitalist ideology or pawns of US imperialism.”22 The Pentecostals and new religious movements are so adept in translating their ‘prosperity gospel’ into ritualizations that are electrifying and contemporaneous to geographically, socially, bureaucratically dislocated peoples and individuals.23 These ritualizations are as indigenous, contemporary and potentially revolutionary as
20 Everett Mendoza, op.cit. p.5.
21 Bobby Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual As Social Change. Georgia:
Scholars Press 1991, p.68.
22 Lanuza, Gerry, Christian Fundamentalism in the Philippines, Quezon City: UCCP 2001, pp.31-32.
23 Alexander, op. cit., p.25.
they are alien, traditional and reactionary. Mainline Protestant churches need to equally heed the liturgical challenge emanating from these revivalist groups.
The tradition within the Pentecostal movement that traces its roots from the 1906 Azusa assembly particularly informs reflections on the faith and politics of the marginal mass.24 Recent studies on Pentecostalism have ascertained some helpful ways to understand the potential of Pentecostal theology and practice as resources for the life-rite of peoples’ struggles. Bobby Alexander identified at least two directions in Pentecostalism: the “normative” and the “ideological.”25 The former explains the reactionary disposition of Pentecostalism while the latter its revolutionary potential. Cox similarly identifies the “fundamentalist”
and “experiential” courses within the movement, and the latter, Cox suggests, should be harnessed to release the transformative and creative energies of Pentecostalism.26 A liturgiology of resistance can gain much insight from the more ‘ideological’ and ‘experiential’ modes or dimensions of the Pentecostal movement as these relate more directly to the object of the Christian’s subversive pilgrimage: the anti-empire reign of God.27
Furthermore, in the practical realm, Pentecostalism is also reaching out beyond its traditional constituency. The movement has now successfully penetrated the enclaves of the urban middle class. It has been extraordinarily effective in bringing to this increasingly alienated class a real ‘good news’ that speaks to them and their situation.28 Central to this act of communication are worship assemblies that are generative of new identities, bringing the disenfranchised mass to a liminal, self-transcending and self-identifying state.29 It is from these gatherings that “mythologies of the new self” are constructed, aiding transformative processes, especially in domestic situations30 as well as, anticipatedly, in larger social situations. The empowerment of those on the margins, the task of any conscientization and community organising work, has now, ostensibly, gone through and beyond Freire’s popular education method.
As proposed by students of the Pentecostal phenomenon, the same task of people empowerment is now being pursued through another approach – the
‘Pentecostal route.’31 “Far from being an escapist ghetto for the powerless,” the Pentecostal communities, writes Bernice Martin “offer a route to new
24 Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century. London: Cassel 1996, p.30.
25 Op. cit., pp.58ff.
26 Op. cit., p.319.
27 Alexander, op. cit., p.60.
28 Lanuza, op. cit., pp.25ff.
29 Mercado, Leonardo. El Shaddai: A Study, Manila 2001, pp.7ff.
30 Bernice Martin, From Pre- to Post Modernity in Latin America: the Case of Pentecostalism, in: Paul Heelas (ed.), Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers 1998, pp.102-146.
31 Cox, op. cit. p.319; Martin, op. cit., pp.102ff.