January 4, 2004

Dear Friends,

2003 was a year of so many incredible experiences, opportunities, and challenges for our family. We spent from January through June in Guatemala where I worked with the Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies (CEDEPCA). My job was to help design experiential education seminars for their Communication and Exchanges for Peace Program. Teo did great in the second grade in a small private school in the neighborhood where we lived, and Kitty volunteered with CEDEPCA also, offering a series of workshops on alternatives to violence for a group of women in Guatemala City.

During the summer, while Teo spent time with his grandparents in New England, Kitty and I spent a month in training in Chicago to become reservists with Christian Peacemaker Teams (www.cpt.org), an organization committed to being a nonviolent presence in the midst of situations of extreme conflict and violence. The experience was intense and challenging, an ideal antidote to the angst we were feeling about the war on Iraq.

Then, while Teo and I came home and resumed our lives here on the border, Kitty spent the fall at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center on the outskirts of Philadelphia. She took classes in pottery, prayer, Jesus and the Gospels, and Quaker history. Finally, though, we are all back in Tucson and caught up once again in the challenges of the borderlands.

There were many ways in which I was challenged and stretched in my faith during the year. I want to share one of those experiences that I find myself reflecting on a great deal.

In April, I was invited by a colleague named Veronica Perez to lead the Bible study at her small, Mennonite, Pentecostal church in a poor neighborhood on the north side of Guatemala City. She particularly wanted me to share some of my experience with migrants on the border between the United States and Mexico.

The small sanctuary was comfortably filled with about thirty-five or forty people that Sunday morning. There were a couple of teenagers with a drum set, electric guitar, and keyboard up on the stage at the front of the room. For the first hour of prayer and praise, there was never a pause, as the worship leader led us from one song immediately into the next. We moved into prayer several times and then transitioned seamlessly back into the music.

After about the first thirty minutes, one of the women in the congregation began to cry and wail. It was a kind of keening sound, truly a lament in the way the Bible speaks of lamentations. She moved to the front of the sanctuary and prostrated herself on the edge of the stage in front of the pulpit, and she continued her weeping and crying. Her pain was so strong that we all could feel it with her.

Almost immediately, some of the lay people, together with Veronica, moved forward to comfort her. They also got on their knees, and they held her and prayed with her while the rest of the congregation sang even more loudly than before. We sang several more songs, at least for another ten minutes, and then slowly the worship leader began to choose quieter, calmer songs.

Eventually, the songs became prayer for the woman and for her family. We prayed that God might give her strength and heal her from her pain and suffering, and we prayed with the complete conviction that God would hear our prayers.

Later, it was my turn to lead a Bible study about migrants and the life-threatening dangers they confront where I live on the border. The congregation remained focused and interested as I shared my experiences. We talked about their families, because almost everyone in the room had a close family member who had gone north. We talked about the economy in their own neighborhood and the ways their families were struggling and the pressures on them to give up and head north themselves. Overall, they were more aware, savvy and interested in these issues than the average church or college group with whom I speak in the United States, and they had no trouble understanding how to connect the issues to their faith and their reading of the gospel.

I have so much to learn about this kind of faith. I had several such “aha” moments while I was in Guatemala, moments when I was challenged to discover the connection between my utter dependence on God on the one hand, and the very real political implications of my faith on the other. We have so much to learn from the church of the Latin America, Africa, and other places of the “Two-Thirds” world.

In the last few weeks, I’ve thought more about the experience as I’ve been reading Dick Shaull’s and Waldo Cesar’s book, Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian Churches, in which the authors suggest that the Pentecostals have become the church of the poor in our world today and that their appreciation for the movement of the Holy Spirit has the potential to move us into a new Reformation.

I hope that you are looking forward to another year of challenges and opportunities to serve God’s people. We’ll be in touch again as those challenges unfold in our own lives.

Rick

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 138