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A holistic community health program called Salud Y Vida ("Health
and Life") has a medical dispensary in a homesteading community
but concentrates on education and community health development,
training volunteer women as health promoters and giving classes
on a variety of health concerns, including a class on cooking
traditional Mexican meals with texturized soy protein in place
of meat or fish. Members of the Dios Habla Hoy Church serve on
the board of the health project as well as that of the Casa de
la Esperanza ("House of Hope") Orphanage, a separate
binational Presbyterian ministry in Tijuana. In 1992 they also
helped start a new church development out of the health ministry
in the El Pipila homesteading neighborhood.
A group of San Diego Presbyterian Churches called "Baja
Presbyterian Missions" has provided funds and buildings for
evangelism and new church development through the Mexican Presbyterian
Church in Ensenada, Mexicali, and Tijuana. A missionary from the
Presbyterian Church of Korea has worked in Tijuana, starting three
small new church developments in homesteading areas. The Pueblos
Hermanos team has been resourcing these various Presbyterian works
in evangelism and leadership development as well as coordinating
mission visitation teams from the United States that spend up
to two weeks sharing in the life and mission of local churches
in Baja California, helping with various construction needs as
well as with evangelism, vacation Bible schools, and youth recreation.
Various teams from the Dios Habla Hoy Church and other Baja California
churches have done mission visitation trips to the United States
to collaborate with various churches there. The Pueblos Hermanos
team coordinates with the Mexican Presbytery and a variety of
U.S. churches in providing leadership development conferences,
workshops and courses, some primarily for pastors, others for
laity, and others for both.
Bill graduated from Pomona College, Claremont, California, in
psychology in 1965, worked three years in the U.S. Peace Corps
in the Philippines in secondary math teaching and teacher training,
and then graduated from the San Francisco Theological Seminary
at San Anselmo, California, in 1971. From 1971 to 1979 he served
as pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Quilcene, Washington,
40 miles west of Seattle on the Olympic Peninsula, where he also
served in his presbytery's Christian Education Department, chairing
it for three years, and on the synod's task force on aging. He
then pastored the English-speaking Interdenominational United
Church of Guadalajara, Mexico, from 1980 through mid-1983.
Bill began serving in mission with the PC(USA) in June 1983.
He studied Spanish for ten months in San Jose, Costa Rica, and
has served in Tijuana since the summer of 1984. He is a member
of the Presbytery of San Diego and serves as chair of its Self-Development
of People Committee.
Bill and his wife, Susan, have two children: Shana Maria, 25,
who served five months as a young adult volunteer in mission in
the Philippines before earning her master's in public policy,
and who now works as a consultant to government agencies for Price
Waterhouse in Washington, D.C.; and Jonathan Luke, 21, who is
studying full time at Southwestern Community College, Chula Vista,
California.
Birthday: August 14
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