Filipino American Spiritual Formation through Creative Storytelling
The overall goal of this project is to experiment with storytelling in a predominantly Filipino American urban church context with the intent of observing the unique characteristics and take on storytelling and spiritual formation for Filipino Americans. My hope is for this to be a learning opportunity that can potentially serve and teach the Filipino American church and broader Church about facilitating storytelling in creative and communal ways. This goal will be reached through the three following objectives: (1) Creating spaces for intergenerational story-telling, (2) integrating art into regular rhythms of church life, and (3) engaging congregants around themes relevant to the Filipino American Christian life and experience in the city.
This project aims to address these questions through experimenting with art and storytelling spaces within the church. Filipinos have a cultural value called “kapwa” or a people of shared identity and story. However, due to colonial mentality and pressures to assimilate, many second and third generation Filipino Americans may maintain some sense of the value of kapwa, but lack the stories to anchor the value and shared identity. So in the Filipino American context, knowing God and knowing self involves knowing one’s family story and one’s peoples’ story as a means of healing and unforming colonial mentality and colonial spirituality.
The intergenerational storytelling aspect of this experiment is very important because of the need to learn how to elevate elders’ voices and stories in the Filipino American church. For Filipino American spiritual formation, hearing from elders stories helps fuel deeper spiritual and ethnic identity growth. The elders’ immigration stories of faith, resilience, provision and pain restores a lost connection to land, people, and faith that many second and third generation Filipino Americans have lost. This can be risky and complicated because elder generations of Filipino Americans tend to have opposing cultural and sociopolitical convictions from younger Filipino American generations. However, part of the experiment is to see how art and creative storytelling elements can de-escalate and complexify stories that may typically be easy for each generation to politicize or caricaturize.
Melissa Casiano-Sebastian is an InterVarsity staff member serving Chicago Filipino American students and serving as the National Pilipino American InterVarsity Coordinator. She also serves as the Spiritual Formation Director for Garden City Covenant Church. Melissa is passionate about seeing Filipino Americans thrive in their walk with Jesus on campus, in the church, and in Chicago. She is a current Master of Divinity student at Fuller Theological Seminary and is interested in learning and creating spiritual formation resources for second and third generation Filipino Americans through her ministry work and her studies.
Congregational and Community grants provide support for urban pastors, churches, faith-based community organizations, and theological institutions to share resources, ideas, and practices for life-giving ministry in cities across North America. Typically, we invite those who have not previously had access to resources or grant funding. This inaugural cohort of grantees included organizations working with children and youth, capacity building for a community. ministry, support for community healthcare, and research on congregational responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
