Mission Matters
The first step toward unity
I had no idea a simple question could be so powerful.
It happened the night I walked with Pastor David Pumacahua into the New Jerusalem Presbyterian Church. The Quechua-speaking church clings to the steep Andean slope in the indigenous community of Santa Barbara in Huancavelica, the poorest of Peru’s 25 regions. As we walked into the sanctuary on that bitterly cold night, Pastor David looked at me and whispered, “Ora conmigo, hermano, que voy a hacer algo distinto” (“Pray with me, brother, because I’m going to do something different”). That caught my attention because Peruvian Presbyterians like “something different” about as well as U.S. Presbyterians!
Pastor David did what I had never seen anyone in Peru do before: after inviting the 50 or so people who had gathered for worship to stand in a circle, he took his Bible and placed it on the ground. Now, among indigenous folks in Peru, allowing the Word of God to touch the ground is a sign of disrespect, so Pastor David quickly got the attention of the members of New Jerusalem … you could have heard a pin drop!
Pastor David spoke: “Brothers and sisters, what is the one thing we must do each day to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?” There was an uncomfortable silence. A teenager answered, “We must follow Jesus every day.” “Yes,” answered David, “so everyone—take a step toward the Living Word,” and we all took a step toward the Bible. “What happened?” he asked. Again, silence. He asked us to take another step toward the center of the circle. Now we were standing uncomfortably shoulder to shoulder. “What happened?” he repeated. Finally a young girl responded, “Pastor, we came closer together!” Suddenly, we began to understand.
For this was a church that had suffered greatly during the 18 years of the civil war that pitted the Shining Path Liberation Army against the Peruvian Army. So powerful, so ubiquitous was the fear of those days that the atrocities committed in the name of ideology defied description. On any given night, your father might be “disappeared” or your children executed in front of your very eyes. In the Santa Barbara community itself in 1991, 15 members of the community (eight adults, four children, and three babies) were rounded up by a government military patrol, tortured, machine-gunned to death, and their bodies buried in the abandoned “La Misteriosa” mine, its mouth sealed forever by a dynamite blast. Fear, in those days, won out over human decency.
And so as Pastor David stood before his congregation, he knew that every person had the right to hate someone else in the circle. Maybe my sister had given the army false information about your father and he had been executed with no questions asked. Or your uncle reported to a Shining Path informant about my son’s desire to join the army, and the guerillas took him away, never to be seen again. Unhealed wounds had bled the community of its very life. And yet something kept drawing them to New Jerusalem.
Finally, Pastor David spoke. “Hermanos! (Brothers and sisters!)”—“Every day we are to take a step closer to Jesus and, in doing so, we will necessarily come closer to our neighbor.” With that, the Spirit of Reconciliation began to move over us. An older woman crossed the circle with tears in her eyes and embraced a man with whom she had not spoken in years. Later, I found out that he had told the army of her husband’s left-leaning sympathies and her husband had been taken from their bed in the middle of the night and killed. Other pairs came together in a whispered litany of confession and pardon, tears and embrace.
Later that night, as I walked away from the church into the clear Andean night, I reflected on how little I understood about the power of the Spirit of Life whom Pastor David seemed to be able to trust so naturally. Today I find myself wondering what would happen if you and I as leaders dared to do algo distinto(“something different”) in our congregations. What if we dared to take a step toward Jesus, knowing that we will necessarily draw nearer to our neighbors—both our friendly neighbors and our neighbors whom we have every reason in the world to hate.
My prayer is that the Spirit will offer you insight from our global partners as to one step you can take toward the unity that Christ died to bring us.
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