Small Churches

One of the things the diocese mentioned that they wanted to do with me when I first arrived was to take me to many of the local churches, so I could see how the church was working in a variety of communities. 

For the first month or two, that didn’t happen as much.  I went mostly to Holy Innocents, the church on the school campus, and occasionally my fellow teachers or the school president would take me to visit their home parish.  I’m not sure if it was just that the diocese was giving me a chance to settle, or if they just hadn’t figured out where to take me.

Three weeks ago that started to change.  Bishop Pacheo collected me early on Sunday morning and took me to visit a small church community in central Bugias.  It’s still being established, and currently they hold services once a month at a local school building that lends them a classroom.  I was invited along to watch an entire family get confirmed in one fell swoop.  Later, there was a lunch, and following the lunch the ladies of the church took me out to the local hot spring/swimming pool to enjoy the early afternoon together. 

And this past Sunday, Padie Egmalis, the chaplain at Brent, invited me along to his mission station out at Asin, about a half hour away from Baguio.  At Asin, we held the services at a resort spa owned by the family which makes up half the church.  I ended up sitting next to a 92-year-old woman who used to teach at Easter College herself, sometimes holding the books for her to get to the right page.  She sat with me after the service was over and talked a bit about her past, and how she and her classmates had always paid more attention to their American teachers.

What is it like, at these smaller churches?  For one, the service tends to be somewhat more relaxed.  In Bugias, the entire service was done in Illocano, and I followed along about as well as I did when I used to go to Shabbat services and everything was in Hebrew.  That is: I tried to follow along with the sounds and sing whenever I knew the tune, and at the end I think I figured out a few words of it.  In Asin, the priest simply pointed at people to do the readings, and I ended up getting assigned the second reading.

As a very fair-skinned red-headed, it’s sort of impossible for me to disappear into the crowd anywhere in Baguio, and even in the larger churches, I’m not anonymous.  But as with any large church, there’s a lot of people who don’t need to know each other well, and don’t always interact.  I’m an unusual member of the congregation, but I am just one of the congregation at the end, and most of the church parishioners are busy connecting with their closer friends to be too interested in me.  At the small churches, I’m the center of attention in a lot of ways, just because I’m so unusual. 

At Bugias, the language differences were highlighted.  I’ve been here a few months, and I now know bits and pieces of Illocano and Tagalog, but not a great deal of either.  Certainly not enough to string together a conversation.  The people in Bugias don’t have as much of a reason to know English as the groups I interact with most in Baguio, and so most of our conversations in Bugias were somewhat halting as we tried to understand one another.  Smiling, nodding, and finding simple topics of conversation were the order of the day.  In Asin, because it is so close to Baguio, the language differences were minimal. 

And both places fed me very well!  One of the strangest things I found when I came to the Philippines is how few larger churches have coffee hour, and if it is held, how few members of the congregation go to it.  Instead the congregation tends to break up and head to local restaurants for a long lunch with family and some friends.   But in Bugias and Asin, there was a luncheon held after the service, full of local foods.  I had some excellent clams and catfish yesterday, fresh from the local river.  And the people in Bugias wanted to get me drunk, serving a sugar beet based wine with lunch, and constantly asking me if I wanted more of it.  

No pictures, sadly.  I've been bad about making sure that I get my camera before I head out, and even worse about making sure that it has batteries that are charged when I do remember my camera.