UCCP elects new leaders
DUMAGUETE CITY--The General Assembly of the United Church of Christ in
the Philippines, meeting at the Silliman University Church for the 9th
Quadrennial Assembly, has elected a new set of officers for the next
quadrennium beginning in June.
Helen Grace Paris was elected as the new UCCP Chairperson Friday.
Paris, a businesswoman, is a native of Cagayan de Oro City. She had
served as the vice chairperson of the 9th Quadrennial General
Assembly, and as the vice chairperson of the Central Mindanao Area
Church Council.
Rev. Reuel Norman O. Marigza, a professor of the Silliman University
Divinity School, was chosen as the new General Secretary. Marigza won
199 out of the 338 votes that were cast.
Marigza, 51, earned his Master of Divinity , cum laude, from the Asian
Theological Seminary and his Master of Theology from the Silliman
University Divinity School. Bishop Eliezer Pascua, outgoing general
secretary, garnered 137 votes while there were two abstentions.
Also elected were seven Jurisdictional Area Bishops: Bishop Dulce-Pia
Rose and Reverends Melzar Labuntog, Arturo Asi, Modesto Villasanta,
Roel Mendoza, Jaime Moriles and Elorde Sambat.
Other officers elected were Karl Chan, treasurer and Jose Alfon,
auditor.
Pascua, in an interview, said the challenge for the new UCCP
leadership is to continue to mend the brokenness across sectors of the
church, which he started to put back together.
Pascua also expressed hope that the new leadership would resort to
practical considerations in trying to build up its membership,
especially in dealing with the Renewal Movement.
The Renewal Movement, a lay-led movement within the UCCP for the
revival and revitalization of its member-churches, had emerged five
years ago to counter the unabated perception of leftist control of the
leadership and leftist domination of the judicatories of the United
Church of Christ in the Philippines.
“I maintained talking relations with them, making clear the official
standpoint of the church in terms of policy so I do not lose sight of
trying to reach out to them and maintain that conversational line with
them,” Pascua said.
He said this policy had also been extended to the police, military,
and to the state in general, “so I have the courage to face the state
representatives, especially when matters of our right are at stake,”
he said.
Marigza, for his part, said he would gather all the elected bishops in
June to chart the course ahead. “My style of leadership would be
collegial and the bishops are collegial shepherds of the church.”
In July the new leadership would start meeting with the jurisdictional
bishops and the conference ministers, in preparation for the holding
of the first National Council, where they would present their plans
for the year.
Marigza said the new leadership would pick up from the things that are
continuing, “There won’t be an immediate change of programs as these
are determined by the General Assembly or the National Council." (Alex
Pal, UCCP-GA Media Committee Member)
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Try Facebook, UCCP pastors
urged
MAY 27, DUMAGUETE CITY -- Is this the end to the time-tested
three-point sermons?
The head of an international church-affiliated group has challenged
the United Church of Christ in the Philippines to utilize modern
technology in order to reach out to the youth.
Dr. Fidon Mwombeki, general secretary of the United Evangelical
Mission based in Germany, issued the challenge in a speech Wednesday
before some 500 pastors, church officials, delegates and observers to
the 9th UCCP Quadrennial General Assembly at the Silliman University
Church.
"The young speak in a new way today. They have cellphones, Facebook
and other social networking programs and we cannot afford to lose the
chance to reach out to them," Mwombeki said.
He said the church should reach out to the young through social
networking sites. "I'm challenging you to make the changes. We can do
so by adapting or to change the way we communicate," he said.
Sermons usually involve three lessons and generally last at least 20
minutes.
Mwombeki said young people who have been programmed to listen to
30-second advertisemens cannot stand one-hour speeches.
"I'd be very happy to see a program in our church which helps bring
the message on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. If we do not reach out
to the younger generation, we will lose them," he said.
Dwindling membership has been a challenge of pastors over the years.
Rev. Noel Villalba, senior pastor of the Silliman University Church,
said he has seen a decrease in membership and a lack of interest among
members to participate in church activities.
But Bishop Eliezer Pascua, UCCP general secretary, said that the
church has seen 49,000 new members and 249 new local communities in
the last three years, which put the official count of UCCP members at
almost 400,000. However, the 1995 national census pegged the UCCP
membership at that time at more than 900,000.
"With this increment that we are having, we could be between 1.1 to
1.2 million members at this time but we cannot prove it scientifically
because we do not have statistics," Pascua said. (Alex Pal, UCCP-GA
Media Committee Member)
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Philippine
economy headed for slump: Briones
MAY 27, DUMAGUETE CITY--The Philippine economy could be headed for a
slump once the new administration assumes office in July.
Prof. Leonor Magtolis-Briones, lead convenor of Social Watch
Philippines made the forecast in a presentation on the national
situation during the 9th UCCP Quadrennial General Assembly in
Dumaguete City Thursday.
Social Watch is a non-government organization monitoring government
programs towards the implementation of Millennium Development Goals (MDG)
targets in terms of achievements, trends and shortfalls.
Briones, former national treasurer, said the new administration will
be facing an economic slump because the budget for the year has
already been depleted.
“The biggest item in the budget is infrastructure and all the
infrastructure projects for the entire year has already been bidded
out,” Briones said.
She said positive predictions of economic growth for 2010 are premised
on successful elections whose results are welcomed by international
and local business communities.
Briones said that the Philippine experience shows that economic growth
does not necessarily result in poverty reduction because there are
more poor people now than there were 10 years ago.
She presented government figures showing the country’s 20 poorest
provinces coming mostly from the Visayas and Mindanao while the
country’s richest provinces are in Luzon.
Underemployment has been on the rise. Figures from the National
Statistics Office indicated that in January 2010, underemployment rose
to 19.7% from 18.2% for January 2009.
Unemployment improved slightly this year, decreasing by .4 percent
from the 7.7% of January last year.
“When the government says that the economy is growing, you have to ask
where the growth is coming from, who is benefitting from the growth,”
she said.
Government figures showed that from 2007-2009, the services sector
registered the biggest growth at 3.3 percent in 2007 and 3.1 percent
in 2008 while agriculture, which enjoyed a 3.1 percent growth in 2007
slumped to 0.1 percent in 2008. Industry, meanwhile, which had the
highest growth rate of 4.2 percent in 2007 registered a -2 percent the
year after.
Deficit spending has also increased from P12.4 billion in 2007 to 67.1
billion in 2008, jumping to 298.5 billion in 2009. This is augmented
by poor revenue collection. Figures for 2009 show a total of P115.9
billion in uncollected revenues from tax and non-tax sources.
Briones said the Philippines will need to spend P207.8 billion for
recovery and reconstruction in the next three years. “The challenge
for the elected officials would be if they are willing to spend a big
part of the budget for education, health and agriculture.”
She challenged the government to lessen the debt burden by improving
revenue generation, plugging leakages in tax administration and
cutting of wastage from corruption and frivolous spending of
discretionary funds.
"This year," she said, "we are spending 5-10 billion to give money to
the poor but that is not the solution; the solution is to give the
poor people jobs. Relevant education and healthy population is the key
to addressing poverty." (Alex Pal, UCCP-GA Media Committee Member)
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Fewer pastors worry UCCP
MAY 27, DUMAGUETE CITY--Lack of interest among young people to take up
ministry is making the UCCP take a second look at their pay scale.
“There’s a problem,” Rev. Reuel Marigza, professor of Divinity at the
Silliman University Divinity School, and a member of the UCCP’s Faith
and Order Commission, said over an interview with church-owned DYSR-FM
here.
“Part of the difficulty is that the ministry is not very attractive
because, according to Silliman University President Dr. Ben Malayang,
this is the only degree where the student will enter to become poor,”
Marigza said.
Pastors are paid directly by local churches, which enjoy strong local
autonomy, but this also results in a scenario where small churches
could hardly pay their pastor a decent salary.
Rev. Callum Tabada, former associate pastor of the Silliman University
Church, agreed with this observation. "The thought of going into the
ministry is wonderful but sometimes, reality bites, especially when
you get married and you have children," he said.
Pastors have been telling their teachers that their lives were better
as students than as pastors, Marigza said, adding that from 100
students at the SU Divinity School in 1998, the current enrolment is
down to 60.
There have been long-running discussions within the UCCP on the issue
of salary standardization, which would also require rethinking of the
Church’s own structures as well.
“If we change that paradigm where we move a greater amount to the
larger judicatories, like the Conferences, we can do something like
that but it’s like starting from the top,” he said.
In the last General Assembly held in Digos, Davao del Sur in 2006,
there was a move to standardize the base pay of Conference Ministers,
as hopes were expressed by pastors that this would eventually trickle
down to the small churches in the rural areas. (Alex Pal, UCCP-GA
Media Committee Member)
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 'Love
and care to unite UCCP'-Malayang
MAY 25, DUMAGUETE CITY--Silliman
University President Dr. Ben Malayang III has challenged the United
Church of Christ in the Philippines to be a loving and caring church
in order to get out of the crisis it is in today.
Keynoting the opening worship service of the 9th UCCP Quadrennial
General Assembly at the Silliman University Church Tuesday, Malayang
said that the example cited in the parable of the Good Samaritan shows
that to love and to care resolves crises.
The UCCP, with over 500,000 members,
is one of the biggest and most vocal protestant churches in the
country which was formed in 1948 out of a merger of the Evangelical
Church of the Philippines, the Philippine Methodist Church, the
Disciples of Christ, the United Evangelical Church and several
independent congregations.
“The UCCP,” Malayang said, “is united in how it insists it is, but
frequently disunited and in disarray over how it conducts itself.” He
said the vibrant unity of spirituality and social advocacy have become
two separated movements of self-righteous pietism and self-righteous
radicalism.
“Each is claiming to be the perfect path for the church and each is
looking down—in fact, condemning—the other as an incorrect practice of
the faith,” he said.
The crisis after crisis facing the UCCP today, Malayang said, might be
because we have failed God.
He said the Church is being harsh to its pastors by expecting them to
be always there on demand and yet paying them poorly and accepting
that they should always be poor.
“Are we not brutalizing them and their ministry by calling them into
our churches more to serve at our pleasure rather than for the
pleasure of God?”
The church, he said, may also have become too uncaring and unloving of
our congregations and of the many people around our churches.
“Might we be in crisis because we have been to preoccupied with our
affairs within our church that other than talking about them…we hardly
have time and the predilection to attend to the many needs of those
outside our churches?” he asked.
Malayang said that the commandment God gave to Peter thrice to “feed
my flock” is being given to us today. “Our task is to always
understand what this command means to us in our many different ways of
living our faith.”
Only by loving and caring can the UCCP become a church that truly
liberates people—and our world—from crises, Malayang concluded. (Story
and Photo by Alex Pal, UCCP-GA Media Committee Member)
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UCCP to lobby for
passage of RH law
MAY 25, DUMAGUETE CITY--The United Church of Christ in the Philippines
is lobbying for the passage of a Reproductive Health law in the 15th
Congress.
Bishop Eliezer Pascua, UCCP general secretary, said they have high
hopes that the RH bill will be passed because there is now greater
awareness for reproductive health among parents.
The UCCP is one of the biggest and most
vocal protestant churches in the country which was formed in 1948 out
of a merger of the Evangelical Church of the Philippines, the
Philippine Methodist Church, the Disciples of Christ, the United
Evangelical Church and several independent congregations.
“We have long been in favor of responsible parenthood and responsible
family planning. We are not necessarily curtailing the private
judgments of couples,” Pascua told the Dumaguete media in a press
conference following the opening of the 9th UCCP Quadrennial General
Assembly at the Silliman University Church here Tuesday.
While admitting that this position may put the UCCP in direct
disagreement with the Roman Catholic Church, Bishop Pascua said the
UCCP’s paramount concern is the welfare of the families.
“This issue is being discussed with the representatives from the Roman
Catholic church in the Ecumenical Bishops’ Forum. We clash on these
specific issues and sometimes, they would just listen to us,” Pascua
said.
On the other hand, Rev. Ephraim Guerrero, executive secretary for
organizational ministries, said the position endorsing the RH Bill is
coming from the United Church men, a lay organization in the UCCP.
“The UCCP,” Guerrero said, ”is a member of an inter faith group
lobbying for inter-health care. And we are also establishing relations
with the laity of the Roman Catholic Church. It is with them that we
are networking.” (Alex Pal, UCCP-GA Media Committee Member)
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