Rev Cyrus Kung, Church Engagement Manager (SA & WA) at UnitingWorld reflects on his recent visit to Tacloban:
“I sat in a humid room in Tacloban City, Philippines, listening to Filipino theologians speak about what it means to follow Jesus in their context.”
I was there with Rev Philip Gardner, General Secretary, SA Synod, and Dr Sureka Goringe, UnitingWorld National Director, representing the Uniting Church in Australia at the 13th Quadrennial General Assembly of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP).
Tacloban knows something about resilience. Many will remember its name spoken in the same breath as the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan in 2013*. To sit there, more than a decade later, among Christians full of faith and fire, was itself a kind of sermon.
The Assembly gathered under a theme simple and demanding in equal measure: “Walking with Jesus: Journeying with the Anawim”.
Anawim is a Hebrew word referring to the bowed-down ones, the poor, those who have nothing left to lean on except God.In Mary’s Magnificat, the Anawim are the ones God lifts while the proud are scattered. And in Jesus, God doesn’t send the Anawim a message from a safe distance – God becomes one of them, entering the story from the bottom.
I had read of this theology before, but I was struck when I heard it spoken by people for whom it isn’t academic.They weren’t reflecting on poverty from a comfortable distance. They were reflecting on it from within and finding, in Jesus, a living reason to keep going. I thought of the communities we walk alongside in Australia: the newly arrived, the isolated, the ones for whom Sunday morning is the one place they feel truly seen. Different context, same gospel. The same Jesus who moved toward the least and the lost calls us to do the same.
This is what partnership through UnitingWorld means. We may be far away, but we are walking the same road. When we support our UCCP sisters and brothers, through prayer, through giving, through showing up, we are not offering charity from above.
We are joining a journey already underway, toward a world where the hungry are filled, the bowed-down are lifted, and no one is left behind.
* In 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, also known as Super Typhoon Yolanda in Philippines, caused over 6000 deaths in Philippines. Because the Tacloban area has a high population in low-lying areas, it was a major centre of devastation and loss of life.