5
Power and Diaspora Missional Agency
In the previous two chapters, I presented two major causes that generate and perpetuate a sense of powerlessness for everyday people in the Philippines: structural evil and social imaginary.
To verify these two factors, I referred to extensive literature and ethnographic research of Filipino American Protestants who were born and raised in the Philippines and then immigrated to Texas in the United States.
In this chapter, I focus on answering research question 3 as described in chapter 1, “How do US-based Protestant Filipinos in Texas perceive, negotiate, and exercise power?
Do they believe the missional calling to transform the lives in the Philippines?
If so, how do they respond to it?” Therefore, this chapter explores the missional agency of US-based Filipino Protestants in Texas as the agents who can bring about transformation in the Philippines.
They do not live in the Philippines.
Hence, they are not influenced by structural evil in the Philippines anymore.
Even though they live in the United States, they are still aware of Filipino cultural values and even maintain some of them as well.
Nevertheless, their cultural values have been negotiated, complemented, and modified by American cultural values.
Furthermore, I argue that their Protestant faith serves as the groundwork on which they understand, perceive, and exercise power, in ways different from that of Catholicism.
Whereas Catholic Churches are dominant in the Philippines, Protestants can be an alternative group of people who can speak of the need for change and present specific pictures of change.
I discovered that their Protestant faith inspires them to strongly believe in the transformation of the Philippines through the transforming power of God, and to desire to be the divine vessel for that transformation of their homeland.
In this chapter, I explain this religious aspiration for transformation through the concept of missional agency and describe some potential changes triggered by them with respect to a sense of powerlessness in the Philippines.
Some people might wonder why this study focuses on the agency of Filipino American Protestants for the transformation of the Philippines; they might think that the agents for the change have to be sought and found in the homeland first and the actual transformation should come within the local people, not from outsiders.
In the never-ending process of seeking the transformation of the Philippines, US-based Protestant Filipinos are one of many other ways to accomplish this goal.
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