Quinto Aniversario y el Panecillo

Well this Sunday was a wonderful one. I had to get up earlier this week because we were going to church this morning. (If you don't remember I usually go to church on Saturday, so an early Sunday is not common). But we got up and went to the Iglesia Familiar Biblica (The Biblical Family Church). The reason we were going here is because it was it's 5th anniversary. And this is the parent church to A Lot of other churches in the Quito area, including the one I go to on Saturdays. It was a packed service. It started out with some very upbeat praise and worship music. I really enjoyed it. Here they had a full praise band which was really fun to praise with. After that we had the message where the pastor went through the letter to the church at Philedelphia in Revelation. He pointed out the key things that God was blessing the church for, namely, Obedience to the word, not denying the name of Christ, and being steady and consistent in their walk with the Lord.

After this the church service went into a time of celebration. It started with some members (one of which is the pastor of the church I attend) offering some special music. After that the children came out. They all had their faces painted and were following the orders of the leader in front. I can't really remember all that they did because there was so much noise I had trouble hearing and I was real busy trying to get some pictures of it. After this some of the older kids, who had face painting only in black and white (who I told BJ looked kind of like the group KISS) did a mimed skit. It began with one in the front with his hands out to the side as if on a cross. Then various of the kids came by and changed his arm positions, putting different clothes on him or giving him some magazine to read. The in the end a girl walks by with the Bible, she corrects the figure by putting his arms and feet as if on a cross, then she bowed at his feet. So, the skit was about how easy it is to make Jesus in our image instead of being made into his. It was really powerful.

After this we had some testimonies, which due to the restleness of the crowd (since all kids were included at this point) I couldn't make it out. Crowd noise and foreign language make for a hard time. But after this we had one last skit to music this time. The praise band played, narrated, and sang a song during a skit about Daniel and the Lion's Den. It was really good but hard to see. You could tell this was the highlight because everyone got out of their seats and went to the front to watch, leaving anyone who didn't without a view. So I tried to snap pictures of it through the cracks but none are that great. But it was also a real powerful skit about how if we are faithful, God will give us the victory in one way or the other. After all of this we retreated across the road to a restaurant the church had reserved for Almuerzo. We went, had a wonderful Almuerzo with some other gringos at the church and then left.

After this all happened, we went to El Panecillo. What's that you ask? Well it is a HUGE statue of the Virgin Mary that over looks the city of Quito. We took a bus and a taxi to get up there and once up there it was an amazing view of the city. You can even, for one dollar, climb up into the statue and view from there. Too bad it was an extremely cloudy day because the view of the city was good but you really couldn't see the mountains, which would have been amazing. But while I was looking at the statue and talking with others about it, it is odd the form of Catholicism I am encountering here. Before I left, Jim McCoy gave me an article to read and in it it said this:
"When Christianity came into Latin America, many of the indigenous groups simply changed the names of their gods: they gave them Christian saints' names. But they really continued worshipping their original gods.... [In the first evangelisation] Christ was either a helpless baby, toward whom we feel affection and compassion, or a corpse, a dead body with no power or ethical demands.*"

I'm starting to see this SO much here. The panecillo statue has the Virgin as being the conqueror. She is standing on the moon, holding the serpent down while holding him by a chain, and all of this is on top of the world. And all of this is to be as a protector for the city. When I entered the presidential palace or the many cathedrals, Jesus is always portrayed as a dead corpse. While I understand that the death of Christ is really important to our faith and that in John's Gospel the crucifixion is the glorification of Jesus, the story does not end there. It goes on to a Sunday morning where Jesus was resurrected. Not just resucitated to die again. But resurrected to a life that never ends. He was and is God and he is a live and with us today. That is what the Catholic church here seems to miss a lot. That God is here...you don't just go and pay a saint to protect you. You don't just go confess your sins and then go and do it again. You don't just put a virgin statue in a box to bless the place. God is alive. He is risen and he is with us every day. I would hear people talk against the Catholics because of the crucifix and I guess for me I never understood it. I realized that the death of Christ awas a very important part of the story so I was confused. Because a lot of Catholics I read about or whose work I read I deeply respected and they lived in a way that Christ was alive and real to them in a relational form. But now I'm seeing the down side. If Christ is dead, if he is still on a cross, why bother. But if he is resurrected and alive he is our hope and salvation. (1 Corinthians 15:12-20) So this is just a little bit that I am learning and experiencing.

*From Christianity Today, August 8, 2007 edition. Interview with Ruth Padilla DeBorst