Misssion Trip... Day 2 // Christ's Commission Fellowship

Sunday afternoon we were immersed into a different aspect of the Filipino culture. We went to the mall to exchange money and to eat lunch. The food court was quite overwhelming because everything was in Tagalog but thankfully they had pictures of the food at each of the restaurant's. I ended up having some pork and a big portion of rice. And a couple of us got these stuffed waffles that were masarap (delicious).

Such big portions of rice!

Mmmm... stuffed waffles.
Photo Cred // Elizabeth Ratzlaff

After lunch we loaded into the van and Seth drove us to Christ's Commission Fellowship which is this massive church in Manila. Seriously it would put any "mega" church here in the states to shame. This church can hold up to 10,000 people. How neat is that?! CCF is pretty incredible in the fact that it is debt free due to the fact that as the donations came in they built it. There are three levels to this church, escalators, a cafeteria, a book store with a coffee shop above it, and well that is just all that we saw. Oh, and there was a pretty incredible view of part of the Manila skyline.

Three levels. Crazy.

Compared to the blind church we saw that morning it was just night and day. I was sad to see the lack of the Filipino culture within this church. It is interesting to think how we could be the problem for this in the fact that I could see so much of the American church's influence which just broke my heart because the Filipino culture is beautiful. And I am not too sure if the American church's influence is good or bad but hey those thoughts are for another post another day. On a side note it was nice to hear English throughout pretty much the whole service. The worship didn't seem as authentic but not to judge too quickly because only God knows the hearts of these people. It did feel like we were at a concert though.

Worship at CCF.

As most of us were making harsh judgments after this worship experience, we had no idea what to expect from the sermon. And well we judged way too quickly when we saw that the pastor wasn't present and that we were going to be watching a sermon that was recorded from the morning. Dang. We should not be so quick to judge because this sermon we heard was spot on. The message was based on Genesis 6 & 7 ... Noah and the flood. It was neat to hear some things I have been learning here at Ecola in the message. I definitely learned new stuff as well. The pastor tied in so many different things into his message like for instance how the Chinese character for ark has the shape of a boat in it.

"Faith is not dependent on feelings rather

 faith is dependent God's word."

Faith has been one of the biggest things God has been teaching and stretching me with this year. I was encouraged when the pastor motivated everyone to be more like Noah and start building arks. Because if you think about, Noah was pretty crazy to build an ark when it looked like no rain would be coming. Now that takes a lot of faith to trust God when he says a massive flood would be coming that would take out pretty much everything. I pray we can all be more like Noah and walk with God in such a way that when he says build an ark we would do just that.

That evening we experienced our first market. It was pretty neat and fun. For dinner we ate at this place called Tiendesitas. Tiendesitas was really cool because while we ate a variety of cultural foods that Seth wanted us to try there were was this cultural dance show that went through the history of Filipino dances. 

Yay for eating lil' fishies. 

Annnd that's a wrap for Sunday. It was quite the day as we embraced different aspects to the Filipino culture. 

View of Manila from CCF.