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Books, CDs And Church In Armenia Bonito
In the past few days we have spent much time out in Armenia Bonito getting to know lots of the Hondurans already serving in churches. There are three small, struggling churches in Armenia Bonito serving the community of over 2000. It is culturally appropriate for us, the new guys, to introduce ourselves to the existing churches. This is something we should have done long ago and just didn’t get around to it.
We spent the last few days meeting with the pastors and children’s leaders of each church. We let them know that we are in Armenia Bonito to work with them and help them and not usurp the work they have been doing.
We met with Ronaldo and his wife. They work with little kids in a Christian group that is not affiliated with any church. We gave them color markers and kid’s Bible studies in Spanish. They have no resources and appreciated these gifts.
We attended Pastor Arilios’ church on Sunday evening. We stood up during service and introduced ourselves. We provided a brief Bible lesson and let them all know we wanted to help them reach the other people of Armenia Bonito.
We had a meeting with Pastor Santos at his church. When we met with Pastors Arilio and Santos we provided them each with a gift box full of Spanish Bibles, children’s Sunday School materials, evangelism tracts and Spanish language theological books. This was an important gesture to convey that we are in Armenia Bonito to work with them and not compete against them. There is a similar gift box awaiting our meeting with Pastor Melvin, who we hope to meet with this evening. This small token for each church consisted of things that these extremely poor churches couldn’t afford themselves.
Through this process we were introduced to two blind Christians living in Armenia Bonito. Elton is a 28-year-old man who has been blind for seven years. Chela is a 65-year-old woman that has been blind for 20 years. We met with them separately and learned that they both miss reading the Bible and have no resource to study. Today we took them both copies of CDs containing the book of Matthew being read in Spanish. Both were grateful and showed great emotion.
This was a very important step. We knew that culturally it was our responsibility to initiate these meetings, and we knew that they should have been done months ago. But, now everyone is clear that we are all on the same team.
