Expansion followed as INC started building congregations in the provinces in 1916. He registered his new-found religion as the Iglesia ni Cristo (English: Church of Christ Spanish: Iglesia de Cristo) on July 27, 1914, one day before the start of World War I at the Bureau of Commerce as a corporation sole with himself as the first executive minister.
He was later able to baptize a few converts, including some of his persecutors. In Taguig he was ridiculed and stoned in his meetings with locals. He returned to Taguig to evangelize and preach. Manalo, together with his wife, went to Punta, on November 1913 and started preaching. He emerged from silence three days later with his new-found doctrines and principles.
On November 1913, Manalo secluded himself with religious literature and unused notebooks in a friend's house in Pasay, instructing everyone in the house not to disturb him. Iglesia ni Cristo's first congregation in Punta, Sta. Plainly displeased with the various branches of Christianity brought to the Philippines by foreign missionaries, Manalo began to mingle with a diverse crowd of atheists and freethinkers who had rejected organized religion. There Manalo laboured as trusted evangelist before quarrelling with Adventist leaders over matters of doctrine and customary authority relationships between Westerners and Filipinos. He also sought through various denominations, including the Presbyterian Church, Christian Mission, and finally Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1911. In 1904, he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, entered the Methodist seminary, and became a pastor for a while. According to the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, the establishment of the Philippine Independent Church or the Aglipayan Church was his major turning point, but Manalo remained uninterested since its doctrines were mainly Catholic. He also sought solace in other religious groups. Severely rebuked for privately studying the Bible, Manalo began forthwith to question many basic Catholic doctrines. At the time he resided in Manila with his uncle Father Mariano Borja, a priest assigned to the urban parish of Sampaloc. Late in the 1890s, after a telling lapse of faith, the teenage Manalo rejected Catholicism. During a childhood disrupted by his father's death, his mother's remarriage and the Philippine Revolution, and an adolescence overshadowed by the Filipino-American War, Manalo received only a few years of formal schooling. With their livelihood based on a combination of agricultural work, shrimp catching and mat making, they were humble people who lived on the edge of poverty. He was raised in a rural setting by his devout Catholic parents, Mariano Ysagun and Bonifacia Manalo. Manalo was born in Barrio Calzada, Tipas, Taguig, Manila province (transferred to Rizal province in 1901 and now part of Metro Manila), Philippines, on May 10, 1886. Manalo is the last messenger of God, sent to reestablish the first church founded by Jesus Christ, which the INC claims to have fallen into apostasy following the death of the Apostles.įelix Y. The official doctrine of the Iglesia ni Cristo is that Felix Y. Manalo, the current Executive Minister.īecause there were no precursors to the registered church, external sources and critics of the INC refer to him as its founder. Manalo, who succeeded him as Executive Minister of the INC, and the grandfather of Eduardo V. Felix Ysagun Manalo (born Félix Ysagun y Manalo, – April 12, 1963), also known as Ka Félix, was the first Executive Minister of the Iglesia ni Cristo and incorporated it with the Philippine Government on July 27, 1914.