My scrapbook from this afternoon’s session of Asiamerica Ministries’ Filipino convocation gathering at St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park, organized by the Rev. Brent Jr Quines, rector of Holy Trinity and St. Benedict’s Church in Alhambra, and our ecumenical colleague the Rt. Rev. Gerry Engnan, bishop of the Philippine Independent Church diocese comprising parishes in the western U.S. and Canada and the Pacific Islands.
For those of Filipino background, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles is a crossroads of the PIC (which has its roots in the Philippines’ struggles against colonialism), The Episcopal Church, and members of the Philippine Episcopal Church, all bound together across barriers of language, geography, and historical trauma thanks to an historic 1961 concordat.
Attendees, some from as far as Iowa, heard from TEC’s new EAM missioner, the Rev. Dr. Jo Ann Jaen Lagman, a parish priest and physician from Chicago who took up her new ministry this year, and, by video, from her esteemed predecessor, the Rev. Canon Dr. Winifred Vergara, who described EAM’s governing principles and its founding at General Convention in 1973 in Louisville.
I was along to welcome everyone and speak on the meeting’s theme of empowering congregations for ministry — since, to paraphrase the late Tip O’Neill, all of Jesus’s work is local, or at least starts that way. This will surely also be a cornerstone of the ministry of Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, whose investiture the attendees watched this morning.
