A letter from Ashley Wright in Honduras
April 2012
Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? (James 2:5).
Christo La Roca Church Las Botijas, Honduras
When we arrived in Honduras two and a half years ago some of the pastors and leaders didn’t exactly know what to do with us. We were the first PC(USA) missionaries assigned to work directly with the small, struggling Presbyterian Church of Honduras, and I can’t say we were too confident, either, about how we were supposed to work together. For a while some of the pastors and leaders would come to us to ask for money for this or that worthy project. They were good projects, real needs, but we had no budget, so all we could do was learn about the people, their lives, and congregations and try to tell others what we were learning.
Here in Honduras, especially after the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and the need for emergency aid and rebuilding, missionaries are seen largely as people who bring in outside money and build things. But without quick access to funds and programs, we, and our Honduran brothers and sisters, had to wrestle with what else “mission” might consist of.
I learned that the Honduran Church leaders were also interested in my opinions and experiences, and they invited me to be a part of their monthly leaders meetings. The meetings are always filled with requests for aid because resources seem so scant and needs so great. “We are poor,” they think, “so what can we do but ask for someone else to help us out? We’ll ask for someone from the United States to send us money.”
And what quickly happens is that the seemingly obvious material poverty becomes a spiritual poverty that drains our lives, our hopes, and our God-given self-worth. So I have been encouraging the leaders for some time now to see themselves differently, to dream a bit beyond today, to take inventory of who God has truly made us to be and the things we can do instead of what we cannot. Finally I can see some light and some hope and hear some strength and confidence sneaking in.
One example of this ray of hope has been the pastor of the small, isolated church of Las Botijas, which several months ago began asking for money to buy plastic chairs for their sanctuary. The presbytery leaders were feeling the need to encourage initiative and faith within the congregations and timidly told the pastor that they wanted to help, but that half of the money for the chairs would be considered a loan to the congregation which, when repaid, could help others as well. The pastor was skeptical, perhaps even felt hurt, as this was not how things had been handled in the past. Knowing the economic situation of her flock, she was not willing to make such a commitment and every month would ask again. But the leaders remained steadfast, even growing in their belief that this was the beginning of an important new direction for the presbytery. They even began thinking of new ways to embolden their own congregations and work cooperatively for the future.
A week or two after it was clear that this new course had been set, I visited the pastor in her church. I heard that she wanted to talk to me about the chairs, and I braced myself for the request to find someone else to buy them for the congregation. Instead, she said they had decided not to count on someone else but to take care of it themselves, with God’s help. It would be slow, of course, because the members truly have little money. But they would buy the seats one by one as individuals or families were able to “buy their chair.” And when she said it, it was like something different was in her voice, some pride, some hope, and I thought, “They may not have many chairs yet, but these people are no longer poor.”
Mark and Ashley Wright
The 2012 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 10
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