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Lyda Pierce & Paul Jeffrey
Santa Lucia, Honduras
19 September 2000 I recently spent three weeks in Costa Rica at the Latinamerican Biblical University, an ecumenical center that draws students from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. I went there to help teach a graduate course on evil. Part of my role was to share what we'd done here in the wake of Hurricane Mitch to help communities recover emotionally from the trauma of the disaster. The class was a good opportunity for me, nearly two years after Mitch, to reflect on and analyze the ways we had responded. Natural disasters like Mitch are just one of many crises being faced by the church in Latin America today. The students in my class, church leaders from throughout the region, talked about AIDS, exile, domestic violence, racism . . .the list went on and on, and included the chronic crises of poverty and marginalization that are today exacerbated by globalization. We discussed how the church is responding-or not responding-to these challenges. What does the church's response say about its theology? What is the image of God projected by the church during times of crisis? When Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras, we were immediately bombarded with different theological responses to the prevalent and frustrating question: why? The most common response, heard on the radio, spoken on street corners and buses and across desks in offices, was that Honduras was being punished. The exact sin varied but the basic concept was fairly consistent: God was giving the country a severe drubbing because Hondurans were too corrupt, or too drunk, or too lazy, or because there are too many prostitutes, or because too few people go to church. Whatever. In this understanding of the disaster, violence is caused by an angry God who sits judgmentally above the floods, justifying the torment of the victims. Because of our theological starting point, we look no further for causes and we blame the victims for their own misfortune. Another understanding, perhaps less common at the time, saw Mitch as a natural event which became a disaster because of the sin of deforestation that left mountainsides unprotected from heavy rains, the sin of unjust land ownership that forced peasants onto fragile hillsides, the sin of urban development which left the poor no where to live but steep hillsides and dangerous riverbeds, and the sin of unpayable foreign debt that left the government crippled and ineffective. In this understanding, God is not to be found stirring up the storm, but rather weeping with the survivors in the mud where homes used to stand. Because of our theological starting point, we embrace the victims, listen to their tales of suffering, and ask together what we can do to avoid such tragedy in the future. Our theological vision-how we understand God-has a lot to do with how we respond to evil, crisis, and disaster. The experience of Mitch has left me convinced of the importance of quality theological education. In Honduras, few pastors, much less other church leaders, have any theological education beyond an occasional Bible study at a denominational meeting. Secular education is inadequate as well, and only a small minority of pastors has finished secondary school. The Christian Commission for Development (CCD), the ecumenical organization to which I’m assigned as a missionary, has made a commitment to change this. Along with the Christian Reformed Church, CCD now sponsors an extension campus of the Latinamerican Biblical University. Called the Honduran Theological Community and located in a poor neighborhood just east of Tegucigalpa, the campus has a high school program and three levels of theological education, including non-formal seminars, a high school level diploma in pastoral studies, and several university level degrees in theological and biblical studies. A few weeks ago, CCD assigned me to work full-time with the theological community. In this new position, I will teach classes and lead seminars as part of a program to provide quality theological education to pastors and church leaders, both evangelical and Catholic. At the same time, I'll continue to work with CCD's rural development program by leading workshops, providing study materials, and helping staff in program areas such as gender and sustainable agriculture to reflect on how their work can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of community development-an understanding that takes our theological matrix into account as we work with the poor to achieve the abundant life that God wants for all of us. One of my dreams is to include more women in our programs. Another is to discover with my students a vision of God which helps us both mitigate and better respond to crisis of all kinds. But I don't come into this with the answers. My commitment is to provide Honduran students the space and tools they need to develop their own theologies out of their own experiences using their own language and metaphors. (They, in turn, will provide me with the foundation and context for my doctoral project and thesis, which I confess is more than a bit delayed by the crisis of Mitch.) I just moved my desk to the theological community this week, so this is a new challenge for me, with lots of exciting opportunities to learn. Please keep us in your prayers as we continue this adventure. We apologize for not having communicated for some time. These last few months have flown past with so many travels and visitors it has been hard to find the time to sit down and write. And, I admit, it was my turn to write, and the task just kept getting passed from one long "to do" list to the next. (If it makes you feel better, so did weeding the garden and cleaning up my desk at home.) Despite my tardiness, I want you to know how much we appreciate your prayerful support of our family and our ministries.
Lyda
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