Dear friends in our supporting congregations: For most of the time since Christianity arrived in Latin America, foreigners have run the show. The result is a church that’s been a sort of branch office of a European or North American religious corporation, a community of faith where a lot of what and how people believe has been dictated from afar. In the last three or four decades, however, the situation has improved markedly as indigenous church leaders have broken free of control by missionaries. In some cases, the new leaders have unfortunately just replicated the patterns of authority they learned from the missionaries, yet in many other places they’ve struggled to build an authentically Latin American or Caribbean church, a community of faith incarnate in the unique cultures of the region. On October 20, as Paul was wrapping up a month of itineration in the U.S., Lyda traveled to San Pedro Sula for the consecration of Lloyd Allen as the new bishop of the Episcopal Church of Honduras. Lyda was one of several representatives from other denominations who participated in the celebration of Lloyd’s inauguration as the first native bishop among Honduran Episcopalians. It was a colorful, multicultural affair. Since the Episcopal Church has congregations in both the Spanish- and English-speaking parts of Honduras, the sermon was bilingual. Songs were in Spanish, English, and Garifuna. Dancers and drummers from both Garifuna villages and mestizo barrios participated. Incense smoldered in anafres–clay pots that Hondurans use to warm beans over hot coals. Yet the consecration of Lloyd–an Afro-Honduran who grew up on Honduras’ north coast–represents more than just more lively worship. As Hondurans have taken control of the Episcopal Church in recent months they’ve begun an ambitious new project of outreach, training hundreds of lay leaders who work regular jobs and then travel by foot or bus to remote communities where they have founded small congregations. For several months, Lyda has been teaching a weekly class on pastoral accompaniment as part of her work with the Honduran Theological Community. The class meets at Santa Maria de los Angeles, the Episcopal Church in Tegucigalpa where Lloyd was pastor before being elected bishop. Lloyd is now being replaced by the new pastor of the church, Maria Consuelo Cartagena, the first woman priest to serve the congregation. Times are changing. Praise God. The class has focused on helping pastors and church leaders to listen better to the poor, to not arrive in a community with a preconceived notion of how to help, but rather to work empowering local residents so that they are the ones who become change agents. By helping people organize to better discern their own reality and then figure out how to solve it themselves, the church can more effectively help the poor discover the abundant life promised to them in the Gospel. The old top-down, paternalistic approach that characterized a church run by foreigners has not been good for Latin America. New styles of being a church are emerging in the region, and we’re excited to help make that happen in whatever small ways we can.
Paul came home at the end of October, after speaking in eight states. Combined with Lyda’s travels in May, together we made 90 presentations in 51 days on the road, along the way sleeping in 41 different beds. It was a great opportunity to get to know some of you better, to learn about your involvement in exciting forms of mission in your own communities, and to share about life today in Central America. To all of you, thanks for your gracious hospitality and friendly welcome. We feel much more connected to you. If any of you are interested in copies of the digital slide show we used, let us know and we can send you a CD with the Powerpoint presentation on it. We’re so impressed with the possibilities of new digital technology that we’re thinking of creating a brief mid-term presentation in 18 months. We could send that to you to share in your congregation as a way of keeping people up to date with what’s going on here. Stay tuned. During the summer, all four of us spent two months together in the United States, getting medical exams, visiting our families, attending a couple of conferences, and enjoying the mountains and coast in the Pacific Northwest. Lucas and Abi each got a turn at summer camp, Abi with horses in Oregon and Lucas climbing rock in California. It was a relaxing time, except for the kids’ impatience with long car trips. Are we almost there yet? Now that we’re back home, Lyda continues teaching at the Honduran Theological Community, a budding space for helping Hondurans think for themselves about God. She also continues as a consultant on gender and rural development for the Christian Commission for Development, and travels a bit to lead workshops, including a recent one with United Methodist Women in Miami. The clock is ticking on her doctoral dissertation, which has to be finished by the end of next year. Paul’s medical checkup in June produced the first normal blood test in four years. Evidently, he’s winning his struggle with hypoplastic anemia. We celebrate his health and thank you for your prayers for healing during the last few difficult years. In August, Paul moved his office into the Honduran Theological Community and is helping the seminary think in new ways about using communications technology. He attended a congress of the World Association for Christian Communication in the Netherlands in July, and spent early September in Guatemala writing about maquilas, in the process getting assaulted by a Korean plant manager. He’s helping plan a church-sponsored regional conference to help refugees better relate to the media, and has been asked to be a member of an international rapid response team sponsored by Action by Churches Together (ACT), the Geneva-based international alliance of church emergency agencies. On November 13, Paul will travel to Pakistan for three weeks to cover the churches’ work with Afghan refugees there. He hopes to post a journal of his experiences on our website. We’ll let you know where that is when the time comes. Speaking of our website, it has a variety of new resources that may be helpful as you interpret what we do within your congregation. Check it out at www.gbgm-umc.org/honduras Put a note in Sunday’s worship bulletin and the church’s newsletter telling members of your congregation about it. And make sure your own congregation’s website has a link to ours, so that people reading about what you do as a congregation will learn about your relationship with us. Several of you have asked us for a photograph of our entire family, and to motivate you to browse our site, we’ve now placed a new family photo there. (Hey, we listen to your suggestions!) You can go to it directly. The website has a section on how to get in touch with us. You’ll find there that we have new email addresses, effective immediately: lydapierce@earthlink.net and pauljeffrey@earthlink.net We’ve also added a new section with information about a United Methodist Advance Special that supports our work here in Honduras. These are mechanisms that your congregation can use to send money directly to projects, knowing that 100 percent of your contribution makes it to the project. With Advent approaching, you could challenge the members of your congregation to make a special Christmas contribution toward helping the seminary–an exciting place where lay and clergy are exploring new pastoral forms within an increasingly difficult economic and political context. (For the record, it’s code number 014165-6.) Several of you have written to ask about the passage of Michelle, which was still a tropical storm when it passed through Honduras at the end of October. In some areas, it produced flooding and damages worse than what people experienced with Hurricane Mitch. There’s a short piece on our website that Paul wrote about it. If you want to help the United Methodist Committee on Relief support several groups in the region that are working with victims of the flooding, go to UMCOR's financial website and click Hurricanes 2001, or call 1-800-554-8583 with your credit card in hand. While we covet your prayer and financial support for us and our work here, know that in these troubled times in the United States we pray especially for you and your ministries. As you proclaim hope, fight hatred, flesh out reconciliation, and build peace, know that there are many of us here in the south praying for you. In God’s shalom, Lyda Pierce & Paul Jeffrey |
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