It’s safe to say that Holy Week in the Philippines is an experience in
itself. Touted as the biggest Christian nation in Southeast Asia, the
Philippines treats Holy Week like no other. It’s a time where everything comes
to screeching halt giving people more time to reflect and reassess their faith.
And while the country celebrates collectively, more and more people
understand that faith is intimate, personal, and is not just subjected to rules
and rituals. Having been raised in a Christian home and schooled in Catholic
schools, I have had my own share of experiences with regards to the development
of my personal faith. As a fan of churches, I have been to more than a few both
big and small out of curiosity and there has never been one quite like Church
Simplified.
I’ve heard of Church Simplified through friends from the South (where it
really is a small world) and through posts on social media. For quite awhile
now, Church Simplified has also been associated with Walkway, the interactive,
modern Stations of the Cross housed in Bonifacio Global City every Holy Week.
I was given the chance to know more about Walkway and Church Simplified
when one of my bosses, Divine Reyes, introduced me to lead pastor and founder,
Bebo Bharwani.
For quite sometime now, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed listening to other
people’s journey of faith and how they got to where they are simply because it
helps reestablish and reinspire my own.
In fact, Church Simplified was born out of Bebo’s own personal journey
of faith, “I actually grew up in church, but the short end of it is that I
ended up being very cynical for a lot of reasons. One of them was that I didn’t
always see the claims of life change to be real. And this mainly for my own
life, but it seemed that the hype for the changed life was really what it was,
mostly hype.”
He continues on to explain, “I think in the church world, there’s a
temptation for us to celebrate a lot of external things, like when a person
stops cussing or being able to kick of vices or jail house conversions. I found
that when it came to things underneath, changes inside of me, was rather slow,
so slow that sometimes you really doubted if change actually was taking place
or if it was even possible. Issues like self-righteousness, pride, arrogance,
greed, and lust, they plague all of us, whether you are a young believer or the
old faithful.”
Despite Bebo’s cynicism he couldn’t
quite seem to shake Jesus off, “However cynical I got, no matter how Much I
even came to points where I even disdained church, I just couldn’t bring my
self to totally abandon the idea of who Jesus was. There was something about him, you couldn’t
write him off so easily. There’s something about the life he calls us to live,
one hand it’s counter intuitive - to gain life you must lose it, on the other
hand it feels like he makes so much sense, that it’s so crazy and so unexpected
that it could be true. Plus also, I didn’t really see an alternative to
him that made sense to me.”
He went on to say, “I kept crawling
through my journey, and I feel like God has met me. Not in some “the earth
shook or the sky opened way” but in a way where it’s made enough sense to get
me to the point where I found a ledge from which I could take a leap of faith
from.”
It was this need for an alternative
that led to Church Simplified, “CS is predicated on the idea that everyone is
on some kind of spiritual journey. This journey is made up and influenced by
your context, your life experiences, your joys, your pains. In other words, and
because they are so unique, there will be no other journey like yours.” He
emphasizes that our relationship with Jesus is very personal and is authored by
God, one that is based on a very deep and intimate relationship with him and
the eventual outcome is that one would find life, a full and satisfying life.
But Bebo understands that one’s
relationship with God is personal, God also designed us to lead you to people,
“God rigs it in such a way where your personal unique journey with Him will
eventually run into my journey, and when our journeys interface in such a way
where we can begin to help each other move forward, and where we can begin to
run, walk, and even crawl together, that is the essence of church.”
CS is about trying to identify form
from essence, the mechanism from the heart of what it means to follow Jesus and
what it means to be a community of seekers, “Everyone is welcomed in CS but I
guess we tend to attract people who have the same baggage. Essentially it is a
church for cynical people who aren’t brave enough to abandon faith. Seriously,
it tends to be for people who can’t seem to shake people off.”
And there’s a need for a church like this in the city, “There’s a need for a place where seekers can come and poke around. There’s a place for people with little faith, whose faith is constantly hanging by a friend, that’s us, that’s Church Simplified.” In fact, its mission statement boldly says, “Helping each other take the next step (whatever that might look like for you in your life) in the journey of faith towards Jesus.”
I couldn’t help but ask what made CS
different from other churches, Bebo was quick to stress that it takes all kinds
of local churches to meet all kinds of people, “We see diversity as the outflow
of the creativity of God and it’s just natural for people to seek communities
and experiences that is compatible with their uniqueness, the uniqueness that
God had authored. We’re beginning to acknowledge the reality that some people
like or even need structure which gives so much value to liturgy. Some people
like expressive acts of worship, mainly through music in the midst of a large
congregation, some people, and this is becoming more true of me as I’ve gotten
older, - we just need to get out into nature with close friends and
experience the beauty of God there. Some are extroverted and like to be
surrounded by a lot of people, others have a large internal world and feel
comfortable with just a few people. Like individuals who have distinct personalities,
local churches as well, have dominant traits that will lend to specific
people. This liberating for all us, we can be who God has called us to
be. There are a lot of great churches in the city both big and small who are
really making a difference in the lives of their communities and each church is
absolutely living out what they have been called to do.”
Bebo, along with Church Simplified, believes that Christianity is
different for each person and this is exemplified through Walkway, an
interactive stations of the cross in the heart of Bonifacio Global City that
has been staged for six years now. Walkway has attracted people from all walks
of life and different beliefs.
“We do hope that Walkway will be a catalyst for people to explore their
faith further, maybe even inspire them to seek out a church, if they don’t
already have one,” Bebo is also quick to say that while the Walkway aims for
that important moment, “It’s an end to itself, we believe in the power of a
moment, that sometimes a moment is all God needs to do His work in a person’s
life. We’re just merely providing the space by which this connection can
happen.”
Through feedback, they have heard of stories about those powerful
moments at the Walkway, “It has revealed some powerful moments, powerful
stories. People deciding to forgive others, themselves, and in some cases, even
God. We just wanted to bless the community by creating the environment for
their “aha moment” with God.”
The goal of Walkway is to be able to highlight one’s awareness of God and this is done through art, “The thing that is so powerful about art is that it has the potential to make us think, feel, and experience that which we know is already true about ourselves but can’t express. Art also has the ability to breathe new life into ideas we know are important but have forgotten why they’re important, like why it is relevant to daily life.”
Bebo uses the cross as an example, “It’s such a powerful symbol. It
tells us so many things about what God is like. It tells us that God is
committed, He doesn’t given up, He doesn’t take the easy road, that God fights
for love, that He loves extravagantly. It also
tells us about the broken condition of our hearts, the broken condition of the
world, what we’ve made it to be - that it would take God to humble himself, to
stoop down and experience the worse we had to offer - he did this so he could
heal us. But because we’re so used to the image of the cross, because we
see it everywhere, we have the tendency to become too familiar, the message of
the cross flies over our heads. Art has a way of stopping us in our tracks and
remind us why this matters.”
He then explains the convergence of art and belief at the Walkway, “That’s what Walkway is - it’s using art - in this case, installation art and music to help us get a fresh vision for what we’ve known and embraced to be true.”
This is what has attracted people from all kinds of faith
at the Walkway every year, “But even if you didn’t believe in God or Jesus,
it’s still such a great love story, at some level it will still ring true
because deep inside everyone wants to be loved the way God claims to love
us. I think that’s why even non-christians are still attracted to
Walkway.”
Of course, I couldn’t help but ask a pastor what he can say to those who
have been cynical and skeptical about their faith and he was quick to say, “We
feel you, in a lot of ways, we’re still cynics and skeptics ourselves, we’re
just managing daily to take one more step in this journey of faith.”
He then debunks a myth about the church, “The
thing about church is, it’s made up of broken people. It’s the reality of whom
Jesus came for. He didn’t come for righteous people - he came for those who
were messed up. Although we agree, we could all do a better job at admitting
we’re messed up. Sometimes we wonder why God
would stake his reputation on us, we’re so prone to not representing him
well. But for whatever reason, God chooses to work through people.
At the end of the day, we must resist the
temptation to pin the responsibility of our own spiritual journey on what
others have done or did not do. The responsibility to seek and pursue truth
falls on all of us as individuals, it is our own responsibility to respond.
This is your journey, we believe God is calling all of us to him. We have to
make the choice to move toward him -and the catch is that, you’ll need people.”
And to end, I asked about what he thought Christianity was
all about and he said, “Christianity is about one message. God is for us. God
is for you! He has always been pursuing us. Jesus is the proof of that
pursuit. Everything that has happened to you, your context and life experience
has been designed so that we would seek God and reach out for him and that we
would find, that he had been seeking and reaching out for us all along.”
No comments:
Post a Comment