During our Sunday morning partnership discussions with the Estoreño pastors, we started out in a very wide circle, then narrowed the circle. When the Crescent Hill mission team members and the Estoreño pastors started talking Monday morning, we all sat around a long, rectangular table (closer than before). Others – Pastor José’s wife Serephina, the Espiritu Santo elders and deacons – sat outside this narrowing circle. After one discussión, a break with the two groups talking separately, and another big group discusión, we stood in prayer, in a circle holding hands.
As on Sunday morning, during our discussions Benjamín and Elena did some simultaneous Spanish-to-English translation and translated for the Estoreño folks – into Spanish – some of what Juanita, Lucas, Raul, and I said in English. Plus the Estoreño folks would periodically take a break and Gerardo or Pablo would translate what we’d been saying into Spanish and they’d have a de facto little caucus also..
As we wrapped up the first half of our discussions, we threw the Q’equchi’ folks for a loop. As the members of their presbytery’s council (and simultarneously the members of the presbytery’s missión partnership task force), they were empowered to approve any agreement with us. But we were just a missión team of the church, and anything official the church session (of which only two or three of us were members) would need to consider and possibly approve. A couple of months before the team left, some of us started to pore over partnership agreements that other congregations had with Guatemalan and Q’eqchi’ presbyteries and congregations. Our idea was that we would pick one or two to share with folks in Izabal. But the fact that we never got to this might have presaged what we did next. Elena suggested that we come up not with a set of abstract principles for our partnershp, but a partnership work plan, which said what we are going to do.
The six of us and the Estoreño folks then each took a break and caucused for about half an hour. When we returned, we each read what we’d come up with.
Earlier, befote the break, Pastor Benjamín had outlined the following prayer concerns of theirs:
- The building program of the relatively new congregation in San Jorge (the first church we visited Sunday afternoon, with Pastor Mario preaching and the sound turned up).
- The presbytery effort to raise money to buy land, apprently for new church development.
- The Barrio La Union missión church, so that it might improve or replace its building.
- The Barrio El Chupon missión church (sponsored by the Arca de Noe church), so that they might buy the rented building where they have been meeting or build or buy their own building.
- The building program of the Peniel church at Boqueron, which Fidel pastors.
Coming back after the break and our separate discussions, Pastor Raul outlined the following prayer requests:
- Pray for the presbytery committée and whole presbytery, on the first Monday of every month (at 8 p.m.?).
- Pray for building projects.
- Pray for the presbytery (¿).
- Pray for youth and young adult ministries.
- Pray for new missions (such as the San Jorge church).
- Pray for the session of Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church.
It seemed that the presbytery executive committee meets on the first Monday of every month (just as the Crescent Hill board of deacons does), and that’s where some of this prayer would take place. Pastor Raul also suggested that the presbytery would try a prayer chain, as we had suggested.
The pastors then began to develop an elaborate monthly schedule – apparently for Crescent Hill’s session, board of deacons, and partnership task force – in which we would pray for different of their churches on different months. But I’m afraid I lost track of this and we have adopted our own weekly prayer schedule – more or less going in the order in which we visited the different churches.
Outreach and church planting is very important to the Estoreño folks. Since we had talked earlier in the morning about other ideas, we were a little surprised about the relatively exclusive focus on prayer for Estoreño building projects. During the Sunday morning conversation, Pastor Gerardo had shushed Pastor Fidel up, when he began to make a relatively explicit funds development pitch for the Peniel church building program.
However, the two proponed partnership work plans complemented each other, and the pastors did not seem to mind that we picked up on different elements of our conversatinos earlier Monday morning. At other times during the discussion they also pledged to pray for us weekly or monthly – at what turn out to be regular presbytery meeitngs. We also promised to pray for them at meetings of different church groups – implicitly, the session, board of deacons, Outreach Council, Guatemala misión partnership task force. As I mentioned earlier, at another point, they began to work on a monthly schedule for us, in which our congregation as a whole would be praying all month for one of the Estoreño congregations. But I couldn’t always figure out what they were saying and I probable didn’t write it all down right. And so I eventually came up with a week-to-week schedule in which we pray for each of the Estoreño congregations more or less in the order in which the 2009 mission team member visited them.
Here’s the proposal that we shared in response:
- Prayer – for churches and the presbytery committee
- Write each other at least once a month – by computer – with news, celebrations, and concerns – during the first week of the month.
- Find out ways to learn together – in the first case, about Acts 2 (between then and Pentecost Sunday, May 31) – together, with us finding resources for each other and us sharing interpretations of the scripture.
- Day of vigil and fasting – at Crescent Hill Church – during September 18-19 – timed to coincide with the start of the Estore o presbytery annual meeting
- Visitation – continue to have visits as much as posible.
We also proposed that the partnership have an initial term of three years. Gerardo said they had been thinking of five years, but they seemed OK with three years. We stressed that the partnership need not end at three years (although it could), but this would give everyone a formal time to evaluate how the partnership was working out.
It was at some point in here that we intentionally embarked on a brief discussión of the sacrifices that members of all three various mission teams that had visited Guatemala had made, and the sacrifice the congregation behind them had made. We talked about the lengthy period of orientation the first group had participated in, the lengthy period of discernment the church had undergone befote deciding how to follow up on the first trip, and the funds development that we had put into all the trips – including selling paches after church, just as folks in their churches frequently sell food ítems outside church after church.
They seemed to relate to the image of us selling food after church, just as they do. They said they understood this kind of sacrifice, as well as our sacrifice in leaving our confortable and familiar U.S. homes to visit theirs.
We also stressed that we know that they too had made sacrifices – all of the presbytery leaders and churches to transport, feed, and tool us around – and the individual familias to have us in their homes. Although we made no promises, we also said we’d love to be able to host some of them and others some day in our own homes.
We seemed to like each other’s proposals. Earlier they had seemed OK with our joint scripture study idea, and cheered us on when Pastora Juanita suggested the Acts 2 passage as the topic of study. After the break during the more formal proposals, some of the pastors seemed particularly excited about our proposal that we fast and vigil during the very tour that their presbytery annual meeting would take place (maybe in part because this picked on suggestions that they had made earlier).
Even with the communications promises, we figured communications might continue to be a challenge.
A key part of the start of any in-person dialogue of this sort – at least with these Guatemalan Q’eqchi’ folks – is the systematic one-on-one greetings between each person the room – at least the formal negotiators – as each new person arrives. Towards the end of our discussión, just about every pastor present had gotten a chance to make at least a short statement. Only Pastor Fidel – perhaps because he’d started to make the funds development pitch on Sunday – was sometimes ignored (along with the elders and deacons, pastor’s wives and other women, and children not sitting with us). There’s no doubt that the oldest and two best educated of the pastors among us – Pastors Gerardo and Pablo (and perhaps briefly Arca de Noe layman Luis Botzoc) occasionally dominated the discussions – more late morning Sunday – and Gerardo functioning as the Spanish-to-Q’eqchi’ translator gave him certain auhority. But still each of the pastors got to talk, especially at the end at which time several said what it meant to them to be part of this dialogue and part of this burgeoning partnership. It was quite an experience for us to be particiipating in a dialogue that , for the most part, the Guatemalans really facilitated and essentially led (from planning when and where it would be to setting up a formal program to Pablo and Gerardo essentially chairing the meeting) and that – despite tendencies in Guatemala in opposite directions – each of the Guatemalan pastors got to participate in. But it was also quite an experience to find ourselves moved and inspired to feel things and say things we wouuld not have thought of just days befote, back in Louisville.
I mentioned earlier that we closed the dialogue by standing in a circle around the table, holding hands, and – as a form of closing prayer – singing the hymn “Unidos” – which I’ll repoduce later and which we’ll sing in Crescent Hill’s April 26 worship service. What I want to add was that Pastor Pablo, I understand, introduced this prayer/hymn by saying let us begin our partnership by singing “Unidos” (United). And, thus, without any signing ceremony – and pending approval by the Crescent Hill session – it seemed that our partnership had begun.
All of this made this final segment or two of our two-day partnership dialogue to be a key high point of the trip (along with Juanita’s sermón with Elena and Gerardo translating).
A down side of our interchange became obvious during the lunch that followed and cemented the dialogue and partnership. Pastor José and his wife and two children, from the church in Livingston, apparently arrived in El Estor around the same time that we did Saturday evening. So I was pleasantly surprised that all four of them joined us for dinner at the Familia de Noe church (in hindsight, perhaps because they did not know the protocol). In fact, most of the other pastors sat on one side of the table – in this initial encounter – and most of us sat on the other side – except for Pastor José and his family, who sat with us. During the Sunday morning dialogues and especially by Sunday lunch, Sarafina and their children were less in evidence (although I’ve got pictures of them from Sunday morning).
By Monday morning, this was even more pronounced. The handful of folks there during these dialogues who were elders or deacons from the Espiritu Santo church or were members of Pastor José Domingo’s family seemed OK with being excluded from the dialogue and the lunch (they ate lunch but hung back and did not eat at the table). But Sarafina – who I’m guessing was – as a pastor’s spouse in somewhat faraway Livingston – not used to being excluded from church affairs – seemed furious that she was not invited to sit at the table and eat this final lunch with us. She had to hold one plate and eat while she stood or sat in a chair in an outer circle of chairs and also tried to feed her young children. As a guest from out-of-town, she did not fold into the group of the host pastors’s wife, her daughters, and other church women cooking and serving (and eating last) – or did not fold herself into these groups – but was also not permitted to join the men (and us).
I looked sympathetically over towards her (and over towards the presbytery leaders) but did not make space and invite her to the table. I’m not sure who at this point was more important to please – the pastors (who actually seemed not to be paying attention to any of this) or Sarafina. But I may have erred by doing nothing, as she likely got the message that despite the coed nature of our group we really weren’t interested in pushing even modest steps towards women’s incorporation (like permitting one of the pastor’s wives to eat lunch with us at the table). We’ll see what happens next.
-- Perry
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