Mrs.Claveria was seated in the wooden pew chatting with wheelchair-bound Mrs. Terrado. Most of the sanctuary was empty, but every Saturday for the past few weeks, we had gathered in the building of St. John’s United Church of Christ in San Bruno, California. Mrs. Claveria and Mrs. Terrado would sit in the pews and clap, and smile, as our little church choir practiced. Mrs. Terrado’s house with its many steps at the entry way (at least for a little boy for whom everything was large and tall) and the electric pole-lined streets were familiar scenes, as my dad was the regular driver of the blue Chevrolet van that transported church members to and fro.
Following choir practice, we would eat sumptuous Filipino food and I’d play with family members and new church friends, as we ran around the sanctuary and the church grounds. Hearing the adults speak Tagalog brought back faint memories of Guam and my paternal grandparents taking me to the movie theater to watch Filipino movies, eating hot dogs, eating McDonald’s, and looking forward to eating my mama Pacing’s chicken adobo or some other dish she would prepare in her kitchen.
Food, fellowship, feasting, and faith—these were the common staples in our household and in the Filipino American congregations in which I grew up. It was about sharing with generous hearts every sacred gift that God had given us. Most of the members of our congregation and my own family were immigrant families from the Philippines. Our congregation was like the Philippine barangay (village or town subsection) where everyone knew you, where you shared food, traded recipes, watched each other’s kids, laughed and told stories (some call it “gossip,” but in circles of faith it’s “sharing prayer concerns”). Our congregation was an extension of our biological family because here everyone was either Lolo/Lola (grandfather/grandmother), Tito/Tita (uncle/aunt), or Kuya/Ateh (peer brother/sister).
Everyone in our congregation was either a former Roman Catholic, Baptist, or from the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP). We were an eclectic group who were drawn together because of our oneness in Jesus Christ and out of a shared desire to be Filipino Americans in a new culture. The congregation gave us pride, community , and identity. The congregation augmented the Filipino nuclear family. I grew up in a large Filipino American family on both my father’s and my mother’s sides. My maternal grandmother in particular would regularly hand write, and then eventually manually type, letters to relatives back in the Philippines, sending them money, keeping in touch with news; and she always hoped and prayed that family in the Philippines would be able to immigrate to the United States.
When our congregation went through the process of being chartered and was ultimately chartered by the Northern California Conference of the United Church of Christ, our church, especially our chancel and children’s choirs, would be invited to attend special ecclesiastical gatherings. Regional and national dignitaries would visit us; we were the first Filipino American congregation in the denomination, after all. White, Anglo church leaders would come brimming with pride, joy, and wide smiles as they were presented with barong Tagalog (the traditional Filipino embroidered translucent shirt that was often made of banana or pineapple fibers, worn untucked over a white T-shirt), and they would enjoy the musical presentations of our choirs, followed by performances of such traditional folk dances as the tinikling, which involved two sets of bamboo sticks that would be rhythmically tapped on the ground, while a dancer placed their feet inside and outside the sticks without getting their ankles caught. More complicated variations of this involved the dancer holding candles on their hands and even atop their head.
Many years later, when I was in the seminary and had begun to attend another Filipino American congregation that had joined the Presbyterian Church (USA), I had the opportunity to take a travel seminar for which our class went to the Philippines. We visited schools and ministries and had conversations with church leaders who pioneered and were involved with the “t heology of struggle.”1 Part of our learning immersion was to visit Payatas, a community that lived in the “garbage mountain” near Quezon City. For the residents of Payatas, the landfill was literally their home. We stayed with them and ate with them; our visit occurred a few weeks after a devastating garbage avalanche that had buried several people. A wooden cross marked the spot where the garbage had completely covered and ended lives.
When our class returned to the United States, we attended the worship service at our Filipino American church. What was striking about this experience, on which our professor remarked, was that no mention was made in the pastoral prayers about the Philippines, about the political and economic conditions of our home country/parent land, and that the hymns that we sang and with which I grew up were songs from a hymnal used by any non-Filipino American church; there was little to no hint of a Filipino American distinctiveness about that worship gathering.
It was in subsequent studies in, engagement with, and reflections upon the ecumenical nature and history of Christian worship and liturgy, and of the modern ecumenical movement, as well as in experiencing worship with communities outside of what I had been accustomed to, that I was able to compare and contrast how a particular Filipino American ecclesiology expressed a Reformed ecclesiology. What is needed is a contextual consideration of an ecclesiology that is distinctly Filipino American, that is Reformed, and that is, in fact, an expression of a contextualized theology of struggle from the Philippines as it is being lived out in the Christian diaspora of Filipino Americans who belong to the Presbyterian/Reformed tradition.
Why is contextualization key? What was missing from the initial analysis of my seminary class of what transpired at my congregation’s worship service was how the indigenous theology of struggle in the Philippines was not mutually exclusive of Filipino Americans who now were living out their faith in the San Francisco Bay Area. In her pioneering study of Filipina overseas domestic workers in Hong Kong, Gemma Tulud Cruz connects the diaspora in Hong Kong to the life they left behind in the Philippines, and draws a distinction, though they are related, between the diaspora’s struggle and that in the Philippines.2 Cruz averred that the “FToS (Filipina overseas workers in Hong Kong theology of struggle) challenges ToS (theology of struggle in the Philippines) in the area of contextualization.”3 She pointed out how the theology of struggle in the Philippines lacks explanatory relevance and efficacy in properly analyzing the specific contexts of Filipino women who serve as overseas domestic workers in Hong Kong in at least three ways. First, the starting point of the Philippines ToS is the grassroots effort and struggle of the poor and oppressed of the Philippines over and against the political, economic, and religious elite, whereas the FToS is about the daily struggle of Filipina domestic workers who live outside the Philippines over and against their “local, national, and global domestication.”4
Second, contextualization of the ToS is needed because it does not account for gender justice. The ToS focuses on the poor and oppressed of the Philippines using the lenses of classical Latin American liberation theology, and not the “experience and perspective of women.”
Third, the Philippines ToS has not accounted for the issues associated with migration, which the FToS does. The ToS is focused on the inward struggle of Philippine society’s poor, but not about the 8–10 million Filipinos of the diaspora, whose overseas remittances to kin in the Philippines assist the overall Philippine economy at great personal cost to these overseas Filipina domestic workers who live out th...