Suggested Form of Worship for the Contemporary Zeliangrong Churches
- Part 1 -

Gaichangsui Gangmei *

A scene from the award winning documentary - 'The Zeliangrongs' :: Pix - Haobam Ronel

Introduction

The practice of worship in the contemporary Church should be based on the solid foundation of biblical, historical and theological studies. But the question remains: how does the biblical, theological and historical material relate to the contemporary Church? How does the Church that dares to be rooted in the past form of worship is relevant for the present?

Worship is an expression of the desire present in the heart to seek for and find God and to have communion and relationship in fellowship with Him. Worship is God's initiation to which the believers responded in expression the conviction about who God is and how he is related to the world. Worship is the central of the Church; life and mission, and witness and service. Worship consists of words and actions, the outward expression of homage and adoration in the assembly of the presence of God.

The Zeliangrong traditional worship begins by understanding the worship as an individual presentation on peoples/worshippers' behalf, but the contemporary Christian worship of the Zeliangrong begins by understanding the worship as corporate worship. In their Traditional worship, they usually don't communicate to God in an abstract setting or apart from the realities of their own social and personal lives. Their needs are related to issues of the society to which they belong; personal concerns are related to regional, national, and global issues and problems.

1. Why do contemporary Zeliangrong Churches need a relevant form of worship ?

There is a great difference between the Zeliangrong tribal-traditional ways of worship and the contemporary Zeliangrong ways of worship. With the inceptions of Christianity among the Zeliangrong people there was a creation of two camps of worship, that is, the 'native' religion and the 'converts' religion. The differences they have in the ways of worship have divided them into two camps. There are factors responsible for the differences between the native religion ways of worship and the contemporary Christian ways of worship.

1.1. External condition

Traditional cultural distinctiveness is not the only determining factor in the formation of the distinction between the traditional worship and the contemporary Christian worship of the Zeliangrong Churches. The Zeliangrong are not isolated from the society around them. They are a part of the Indian society; its political ideology and socio-economic structures have affected their lives directly or indirectly. They also interact with other ethnic groups in North East India and adopt, consciously or unconsciously, various cultural elements in the process of socia-lisation.

"The churches of Zeliangrong can traced back its origin since 1925, and background from American Baptist Foreign Mission, and therefore, since then they have always inevitable influences directly and indirectly in their ways of being Christian and their Christian's activities" (Rajien Gonmei, "A Study of the Heraka Movement on the Socio-political and Religious Life of the Zeliangrong" (BD Thesis, Eastern Theological College, Jorhat, 1994), p.35.).

"Christian or the convert of Zeliangrong, in constraint to the process of sanskritization, had taken the new "The Faith in great strikes even abandoning part of their respective socio-cultural moorings. They then assimilating the various accidental cultures through their respective missionaries by initiating and championing, the cause of the higher social groups with occidental power, status, wealth and superiority. In the process, the converts (Christian) had to a certain extent lost most of their social interactions with their own folks at home who remained firm in their traditional belief and faith" (Barrister Pakem, "Interaction Between Christianity and the Peoples of the North East: A Perspective Analysis" in Impact Of Christianity in North East India, edited by J. Puthenpurakal (Shillong: Vendrame Institute, 1996), p. 3-4.).

At the same time it is too much to expect that new converts could have overnight established any smooth social interactions with their spiritual benefactors from the west. Thus, their external relations with the larger society have contributed to producing and reproducing the particular subculture that is the Zeliangrong-American-Indian Christian.

While acknowledging the positive element of India/America culture, the native must also not forget to understand the negative aspects of it. There are always chances that the worshippers monopolised the worship in its attempts to identify the prevailing ideology of egalitarian democracy with the present reality of the Zeliangrong-Indian-American community, failing to distinguish between the ideal and the actual.

1.2. Internal condition

While there are many determining elements in the subcultures of Zeliangrong-Indian-American congregations, their religious practices have been influenced mostly by three neighbouring religions: Tribal Traditional Religion (Heraka), Tingkao Raguangh Chapriak, and Hinduism. These religions have co-existed at home (State) for many years equally old or even older than the religion (Christian) and have influenced various aspects of their way of life personally and communally. They have contributed positively or negatively to producing distinctive Zeliangrongness characteristics not only in religious life but also in over all lifestyle. They have also influenced in certain ways the formation of the Christian faith. "Symbols, ritual practices, and doctrinal and ideological instructions of Christianity have been syncretised visibly and invisibly with the elements of these traditional religions", and this inculturation has contributed to the creation of particularities of Christian faith in Zeliangrong community.

The preceding examination of the internal and external condition of the traditional religions and the contemporary Zeliangrong Christian reveals that they have been greatly influenced by their native (traditional) religions and the foreign religions (as brought by the foreigners). Then and now, somehow both the internal and external conditions diluted the distinctness of each religion. Our discussion of internal and external conditions also reveals that the Zeliangrong are under enormous stress because of native and foreign religion being proclaimed and practiced to and by the one people who has one origin and one vision.

In this congregational context, the contemporary Zeliangrong worshippers are responsible for building an inclusive ways of worship within and beyond the ethnic community. There is a challenge to provide an authentic relevant ways of worship for the community of faith from a Christian theological perspective. This challenge encourages listeners to work to transform the community thro-ugh positive interaction and corporate relationships between the native religion and the contemporary Zeliangrong Christians.

1.3. Colonialism, Missionaries and Indigenous

"A study of the relations between colonialism and Christian mission in North East India examined that the colonialism is responsible for the subjugation of indigenous people, politically, socially, culturally and religiously. Contrary to the widely held view that missionaries functioned independent of colonial powers, Yankahao Vashum argues that there was close relations between colonial powers and missionaries and that however good their intentions might have been the missionaries contributed in the colonial projects.

The British colonisation of India in the eighteenth century and the eventual British control over the northeast region in the nineteenth century—the region basically by the indigenous peoples—served to open doors to the region for the missionaries. The pioneer missionaries who came to North East India in the nineteenth century belonged to the American Baptist Foreign Mission and Welsh Presbyterian mission. Though the Roman Catholic missionaries did cross the path on their way to Tibet and China prior to the protestant missionaries as early as 1626, they did not start any mission work in the North east region. They began their mission work in the region only in the early middle part of twentieth century.

The so called "civilizing responsibility" which is also known as the "white man's burden" was also one mutual binding between missions and colonial where the two accepted as a genuine responsibility for one goal. Christianity itself was a means of civilising and the two went together inevitably. The view was that Christianising and civilising are the two sides of the same coin; in other words, they were inseparably linked. The most potent weapon behind the civilising mission was the philosophy that not only entertained but created the idea of superiority over the native race. Although the British Government maintained the existence of their policy of neutrality, it is obvious that Government officers were indulging in religious activities by way of either helping Christian missionaries or the native people.

One of the primary tasks of the missionaries was to open schools for the native people. By inculcating modern education in schools the missionaries worked toward changing the habits and lifestyles of the native peoples. Children were taught to abandon their hairstyles and to adopt the style of the English and the missionaries.

Modern education, with all the wonders it brought to native peoples was at the same time responsible for the undermining and the unraveling the native peoples' cultures and ways of knowing, in many cases it even brought about their demise" (Yangkahao Vashum, "Colonialism, Missionaries, And Indigenous" : A Critical Appraisal" in Journal of Tribal Studies, edited by Ezamo Murry et al (Jorhat : The Department of Tribal Studies, ETC, 2007), pp. 1-22).

Dolly Kikon rightly argues that: "The introduction of an 'approved' Syllabus by the Indian State, can be seen as a process that 'recolonised' the Naga mind, to an extent where the Naga have lost the ability to construct their own past objectively and critically. This has resulted in misinterpretation and misappropriation of the Naga indigenous knowledge and perspectives" (Dolly Kikon, "Destroying Differences, Schooling Consent : A Critical Analysis of Education policy in Indian Administered Nagaland," in http:// www. Nscnonline.org/webpage/ Articles/ dolly-kikon.htm).

Edmund J. Dunn wrote, "The church sent forth missionaries steeped in European culture that was Christian and a Christianity that was intimately bound to European culture" (Edmund J. Dunn, Missionary Theology: Foundations in Development. Forwarded by Richard P. Mc Brien (Washington, D.C. : University Press of America, 1980), p. 10). "The missionaries, however good their intentions might have been, consciously and unconsciously contributed to the colonial project" (Yangkahao Vashum, "Colonialism, Missionaries, And Indigenous": A Critical Appraisal" in Journal of Tribal Studies, eds. by Ezamo Murry et al., pp. 1-22).

Today, Zeliangrong, like any other indigenous people around the world, are faced with the question of the survival of their identity due to the loss of their life-sustaining traditions and cultures. The uncritical acceptance of the Christianity brought by the missionaries has had a lasting effect on the way Christianity is viewed and worked out in the worship life of Zeliangrong.

The critical question before them is this: whose ways, contents, pattern etc, are they following in Christian worship? And do they really reach the meaning in the acts of Christian worship? Unfortunately, to this day almost all the ways, content, pattern etc of Christian worship are based on dominant western and Indian worship paradigms. Therefore, in many cases the elements they adopted in worship are practiced without having understood or without giving a meaning to the participants (worshippers). The believers read and admire more of Euro-American and Indian ways than their own. Very little of indigenous ways are incorporated into the school of Christian worship. As a result, the worshippers know more about Euro-American and dominant Indian ways than their own ways.

The consequence is that the Christianity that was brought by foreign Christian missionaries along with the colonisers, and continued by the Indian State, has been instrumental in not only perpetuating cultural and traditional dominance over the Zeliangrong people but also coercing Zeliangrong to participate in their own colonisation by instilling in their mind the superiority of the cultures and traditions, which in turn embraced and spread by the recipients, and so, colonise themselves. What to acknowledge is that this has been and still a process of colonising the minds of the Zeliangrong people through imposing and embracing the foreign ways of worship life.

The examination of colonisation and missio-nisation must be accompanied by the process of decolonising and demissionising to provide a necessary context from which an efficacious Indigenous theology can be realised.

To be contnued..