PAGPAPAHIYANG: Contextualizing Christianity to Recipient Indigenous Cultures
This book gets published almost two decades after Cultural Redemption, as theoretical framework and practical ministry, began to take roots and bear fruit. Its chapters, in part or in full, were first delivered as oral messages in various symposia, conferences, lectures and other gatherings in the Philippines and abroad. Then those bits and pieces of works were compiled in a tentative anthology titled PAANO MAGING PILIPINONG KRISTIANO Becoming a Filipino Christian published in 1997. That initial compilation was reworked, edited, enriched and tempered by 12 more years of solid work on the ground and now comes into your hands asPAGPAPAHIYANG. Contextualizing Christianity in Indigenous Recipient Cultures. The Philippine Experience.
The road from PAANO… to PAGPAPAHIYANG, if there ever was a road, was never an easy one. Hostile resistance and aggressive opposition came from everywhere and everyone: congregations, seminaries, other institutions and various individuals who misunderstood, judged and shunned Cultural Redemption. Were were ostracized, maligned and branded.
Now, that’s history. Major institutions no longer call us names and many church personages no longer squirm when we use gongs in liturgy. But while our most rabid critics had been silenced either by enlightenment or irrelevance, our work is not yet done. We have just begun. The artistic heritage of the nations, condemned by culturally destructive evangelization, is still begging for redemption.