Honduras Newsletter Four
July  13, 2004

Dear Friends,

Evenings in Tegucigalpa bring with them a certain kind of settledness and softness.  Days are filled with honking taxis, people calling out sales for everything from the daily Heraldo or Tribuna to bags of sliced and salted mangos and packs of juicy fruit.  In the evenings, everyone goes home and only a few cars drive by outside, and only an occasional confused chicken crows as the sun sets.  I cherish my silence in the evenings...to those of you that know me that should come as no surprise!  So here I am again, sharing my evening with you.

One of the social mandates of the ICLH is to minister to those who are excluded in society.  I spent one of my weeks this past month in San Pedro Sula, the largest city in Tegucigalpa, talking with the church leaders about how successfully or unsuccessfully the church is meeting the needs of the people that feel alienated by society and often, the church.  Our conversation was centered specifically around the reality of a Lutheran church in a machismo society trying to meet the needs of the homosexual community.  The speakers and materials provoked some of the most candid and compassionate conversations I have seen anywhere in the international church.  We sat together around an odd assortment of picnic tables and futon couches and exchanged stories, advice and testimonies.  We asked questions like, do lesbians and gays feel understood in our communities?  What is the role of a pastor in a society that doesn't talk about sexuality?  How can the church in a machismo and tightly closed culture reach both outward and inward to meet the needs of the homosexual community?

After a day or so, the conversation shifted to other excluded groups within the church, this wasn't surprising considering the meeting's context...This particular congregation in San Pedro Sula has the physically nicest church building of any of the churches in the country.  It has a meeting room, several small dormitory rooms, a small health clinic, and a sanctuary with a primitive sound system.  It also has an alarm system, barbed wire surrounding the building and chains on the gates.  The local church president was shot and killed on her way into the church last year by a gang member.  This neighborhood, with it’s playful kids that play soccer in the streets and women that sell tortillas from the homes is infested with gangs.  There is graffiti everywhere marking the territories, gunshots in the nights, youth moving through the shadows under the trees in the evenings.

Our conversation about homosexuality grew to include the gang members that walked through the streets outside.  We than began to talk about the pregnant teenagers in the youth groups and the street children that beg at the gates of the church.  We spoke about racial prejudice in the church and the exclusion of Black Hondurans.  We dug into the devastating reality of HIV/AIDS in the communities and we talked about the prostitutes that have found a place to rest and pray in the thin plastic chairs under the cross in the Congregation in Villa Nueva.  This church doesn't mess around with the people to whom they chose to minister.

Little by little, I watched a talented group of young Honduran women and men begin to rediscover God's dreams for the church, reclarify their vision for the ICLH, and reignite their passion as leaders.  In a broken society suffocating under the weight of debilitating economic instability, an archaic education system, and unconscionable levels of poverty, it often seems impossible that the church can effect any sort of change, but they do.  The leaders of the ICLH, the pastors and youth that stand up in front of the congregations, are in the homes listening to the pain of the single mothers, they are reaching out to their young people that drift towards the ever growing gangs, they are serving food to the children that beg at the gates and defending the humanity of prostitutes that sit in the pews, they are listening to those that struggle with their sexuality, and praying with their communities for peace.  They are bringing a vision of the hope that is in Jesus.

Please remember in your prayers the pastors, congregational and youth leaders of the ICLH.

In peace,
 
Lindsay
Iglesia Cristiana Luterana de Honduras
Tegucigalpa, Honduras