by | Jun 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
Five Filipino Christian leaders weigh in on the American church’s influence on worship, culture, and politics.
The Philippines boasts of being the only Christian nation in Asia. Filipino Catholics make up 80 percent of the population while evangelicals make up another 3 percent.
The country’s large Christian population today is the result of 300 years of Spanish rule, which brought Catholicism to the Philippine archipelago. Then the United States colonized the Philippines for about 50 years until 1946. During this time, Americans introduced a universal education system, the English language, and Protestantism.
As a result, American evangelicalism has an outsized influence on the Filipino church today. From churches’ adoption of English-language Bibles and Hillsong worship songs to the embrace of US-based Christian NGOs working in the country’s urban slums and rural areas, Filipino evangelicals often look to their American counterparts to understand their relation to God.
CT interviewed five Filipino Christian pastors and ministry leaders in the Philippines and its diaspora to examine how American evangelicalism has shaped their view of politics, liturgy, culture, and gender, as well as what living under the painful reality of their country’s colonial past is like as a Filipino believer. (Answers have been edited and shortened for clarity.)
Obed Relliquette, lead pastor of Crusade Bible Church in Quezon City, Philippines:
The brand of Christianity in the Philippines is American. It has a long, deep root in our country. This is why I almost cannot distinguish what is culturally and theologically American or Filipino.
I studied in the Febias College of Bible, which American G.I.s founded in the 1940s and led until the ’70s. The church I grew up in was influenced by Americans who were pragmatic and democratic. …
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by | Jun 27, 2023 | Uncategorized
From joyful big-band tunes to aching psalms, from Dallas to down under, local musicians bring depth and diversity to our praise.
While big-name megachurch outlets produce the bulk of music sung on Sunday mornings, independent musicians across churches, denominations, and musical styles are writing their own songs for their community to sing together—and maybe ours one day too.
Four recent releases by independent artists—Gather, Pray, and Eat by Hey Barnabas! and Sunday Morning Songs; A Table by Saint Augustine’s Music; Psalms: The Poetry of Prayer by Caroline Cobb; and Lent Hymns by Paul Zach—offer new music to accompany and facilitate worshipful celebration, intimacy, mourning, thanksgiving, and supplication.
These independent worship artists have a foot in both worlds: They write for their local congregations but also hope that their songs reach worshipers they’ll never meet.
“We want to create music that’s unique to our community, but we sing to the world,” said Chloe Williams, a vocalist and songwriter in Saint Augustine’s Music. “We’re not trying to replicate anything, we’re not trying to be the next best thing; we’re just trying to be faithful.”
Independent artists add diversity and depth to the repertoire of music available to the church, providing space for collaboration and contributions from a broader community of songwriters.
“We want to create a table, not another platform,” said Eric McAllister, creative director of the worship collective Sunday Morning Songs.
Gather, Pray, and Eat
Eric McAllister is creative director of Sunday Mornings Songs and director of music and liturgy at High Pointe Baptist Church in Austin. He describes congregational singing as …
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by | Jun 27, 2023 | Uncategorized
In the livestreaming era, church sound booths are upping their game.
According to the Prophet Isaiah, grass withers, flowers fade, but God’s word endures.
In the age of social media, so do the mistakes of church musicians.
Play the wrong chord, forget the words to a song or sing an off note, and a worship leader or singer may find themselves featured in Facebook videos or Instagram accounts like “Worship Fails” for years.
As a result, said Marc Jolicoeur, worship and creative pastor at Moncton Wesleyan Church in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, churches like his have paid more attention to how their music sounds online. That includes using Auto-Tune or other pitch-correcting software.
Widely used in the recording industry to smooth out the rough edges of vocalists, pitch correction has become fairly common in congregations.
The pitch correction process feeds the sounds sung into a microphone into a processor that aligns the singer’s pitches with pure versions of the note.
In worship contexts, pitch correction makes it easier for less talented or less rehearsed singers to still help lead congregational singing, said Jolicoeur. If they make small mistakes, they can be corrected easily.
Churches are also more aware of hitting the right notes because their services are going out on livestreams. People attending a service in person, said Jolicoeur, often have a better experience—the congregation’s singing resounds in the actual church building; those at home only hear what’s going into microphones and coming out of their computer speakers.
A 2023 study of online worship from Pew Research found that while remote worshippers rate online sermons and sermons they hear in person about the same, there’s a drop-off when it comes to music. Sixty-nine percent of those …
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by | Jun 27, 2023 | Uncategorized
How the modern concept of self-creation turns Christian community into personal identity.
The recent death of pastor-theologian Tim Keller sparked nostalgia for my young, restless days as part of the Young, Restless, and Reformed (YRR) movement he helped lead.
As someone raised in Christian fundamentalism, it offered me a kind of holy rebellion where free grace, contemporary music, and cultural engagement came packaged with God’s glory and power. But two decades on, I find myself less Young, Restless, and Reformed and more Old, Tired, and Reorienting.
I can’t help but wonder how I got from here to there. What path led me from the traditions of my childhood to and through other ones? How much of my spiritual path was chosen, and how much was given? Was my spiritual life “begotten or made”?
The idea that our faith journeys are larger than our choices challenges the very spirituality most of us take for granted. A committed personal relationship with God is a feature of most modern expressions of Christianity. My 17-year-old son, for example, finds it anathema that children could be baptized against their will. He’s not making a theological claim so much as an anthropological one, informed by a larger American culture that assumes self-creation through choice.
In fairness to him, the majority of low church traditions—including the one I was reared in—hold this same individualist assumption. Commitment to personal conversion and voluntary association may also explain why nondenominational churches now represent the largest segment of American Protestants.
These churches are deeply and inexhaustibly modern, not because of their sneakers and fog machines, but because they align with our contemporary understanding of choice. Without a denominational progenitor, they embody self-determination …
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by | Jun 26, 2023 | Uncategorized
Evangelicals in medicine won’t be subjected to the contested federal requirement that faced years of legal backlash.
The Biden administration will not appeal an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision from December 2022 that blocked the so-called transgender mandate.
The mandate was an attempt by the Biden administration to define sex to include “gender identity” for the purposes of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations. Critics say the rule would have required doctors, clinics, and hospitals to perform procedures to which they object and insurance companies to pay for such procedures.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) president Brent Leatherwood welcomed the news.
“The Biden administration’s decision to back down from the transgender mandate marks a significant victory in safeguarding the rights of medical professionals to operate in a manner consistent with their deepest held beliefs,” Leatherwood said in written comments.
“This is an important development we should take note of because it not only represents a win for conscience rights but also furthers efforts to shield vulnerable individuals who should never become pawns in the sexual revolution.”
The rule was first introduced in 2016 during the Obama administration’s implementation of a portion of the Affordable Care Act.
According to the ERLC, the 2016 HHS rule required doctors to perform gender-transition procedures for any child referred by a mental health professional, even if the doctor believed the treatment or hormone therapy could harm the child.’
Becket, a religious liberty law group, has shepherded lawsuits filed by medical groups opposed to the rule, as those suits have made their way through the courts.
“After multiple defeats in court, …
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