Exit Strategy

John and Shirley Wind returned to their home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, late Friday night, October 30, in a torrential downpour. There was a message on their answering machine: "Go help Jose Arias."

The Winds had served as missionaries in Honduras for 19 years with the Christian Reformed World Missions (CRWM)—sending arm of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC)—and Jose Arias was pastor of a small CRC church in the neighborhood of San Jose de La Vega. The Winds quickly changed and left their home for Arias's church. "It was raining so hard," Shirley later described in an e-mail, "we could see the water rushing under the bridge."

They arrived at the church around 11:30 p.m. to find over 100 people from the community seeking refuge from the storm. "We assessed the situation and decided to go back home to pick up food and blankets and to take those who wanted to to stay at our house."

They left for home at midnight but quickly realized they would have to turn back. "The river had risen so rapidly there was no way out. The water was now over the bridges, and the road looked like a river."

Trapped in the small church building with their people, the Winds could only watch the water rise as Hurricane Mitch—having already wreaked havoc on the northern Caribbean coast—bore down mercilessly in the central and southern parts of Honduras. "We all stayed awake, and from time to time, someone would check to see how high the water level was. John saw a car perched on a fence. Houses and trees were floating down the raging river."

Their final departure from Honduras had been scheduled for December 1998, and John and Shirley Wind did not expect that the last weeks of their missionary service would entail fighting for their lives and the lives of their church people in the wake of Mitch. As it was, another kind of storm had been preoccupying them during their final season of service.

Strife had arisen between the national churches they served. John and Shirley (and the other missionaries) found themselves in the awkward position of trying to remain neutral while sister churches attempted to work through their differing visions of what it meant to be the church. The denominational strength they had achieved over these years and the very life and health of many of their church plants seemed jeopardized. In the midst of the tumult, leaders from the flagship CRC church in Tegucigalpa, called First Church, questioned the ongoing role of the missionaries. "Our problem was a national [problem] and not a missionary one," said First Church member Chrystabel Parchment.

The Winds had already been scheduled to complete their final term, so the turmoil between the national churches did not affect their departure. Nevertheless, at the sunset of their two-decade career in Honduras, the Winds faced saying good-bye amidst uncertainty and discord. They recognized that sometimes it takes as much faith for missionaries to answer the call to leave as it did to come in the first place.

Coming with the plan to leave
"Third World countries today are not the same countries they were 50 years ago," says Chet Thomas, executive director of Proyecto Aldea Global (Project Global Village), a Christian development agency in Honduras. He has lived in Honduras for 25 years, and nothing irritates him more than the idea of patronizing North Americans coming into a struggling country like Honduras and telling them what to do or—worse—giving them a handout. "People [in these countries] know where they want to go. They're not ready to accept an agenda of a missionary who might come in from North America. Anyone considering going into missions should have the idea in the back of their minds, 'Do they really need me?' Or, 'Can the national church do it on their own?' When expatriates work in Third World countries," he says, "it is just as important when they plan what they're going to do that they also plan how they're going to get out."

And in that regard, the CRWM fits Thomas's paradigm. The mission had come at the behest of Hondurans themselves in the 1970s and intended to withdraw by the year 2000. Gilber to Espinoza, a leading member at First Church in Tegucigalpa, re counts how his grandparents had heard the Back to God Hour (a CRC-sponsored radio program) on Christian radio, which prompted them to contact its sponsors in the U.S. and ask them to send missionaries to Honduras.

Pentecostalism had begun to flourish there (as elsewhere in Latin America), and Espinoza's forebears had hoped to add a strong Reformed element to the blossoming Protestantism in Honduras.

On January 1, 1972, the first CRC missionaries arrived. At the request of and in partnership with the nationals, they helped establish the by-laws, organize the first classis (an organizational unit made up of congregations within a geographic area), and launch First Church in Tegucigalpa. Soon more missionaries were invited to come and help plant more churches in other regions of the country.

The Winds came as part of that second wave in 1979.

"To gain ownership, the nationals need to catch the vision of what God can do and what he wants to do through them," says John Wind, quoting a fellow CRC missionary. "Our success will not be measured by how much we have done, but by what we have taught them to do for themselves."

Steve Saint, son of the martyred missionary Nate Saint, who died at the hands of the Huaorani (better known as the Auca), highlights a danger inherent in this enterprise. "Missions is not to go in and create and control a church for other people, nor [to] be the church for them," he said in an interview in Missions Frontier Bulletin (May/June 1998). "It is simply to plant the church … and nurture it until it is able to propagate, govern, and support itself. When missions go beyond that, then they are imposing themselves in the area of responsibility that belongs to the indigenous people, and then everything gets out of whack." It takes wisdom on the part of sending agencies, and even greater sensitivity on the part of the missionaries, to strike the right balance in this delicate enterprise.

And still, things sometimes manage to get "out of whack." In the case of John and Shirley Wind, it could be argued that they and their colleagues did their job so well that they created a fierce independence in the churches they served, which may have contributed to the turmoil they faced as they prepared to depart.

Dairy farmer turned pioneer
John Wind had been destined to continue the family tradition of dairy farming in California when he and his young wife, Shirley, independent of each other, began to sense a call to missionary service. They had two children at the time (two more came later) and money in the bank to purchase land and launch out on their own. They prayed about it for a year, and when the calling to serve in missions seemed unshakable, they sold their belongings and began preparing for a life of service overseas. John took a degree at Reformed Bible College, and they went to language school in Texas, then applied to the CRWM. There was an opening in Tegucigalpa, and the Winds found themselves stepping into an untamed world that bore little resemblance to farm life.

Honduras, population 6 million, is no larger than the state of Tennessee. It is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, with per capita purchasing power of around $2,000 (according to a 1996 estimate), a 15 percent unemployment rate, and 40 percent underemployment—before Hurricane Mitch.

Olancho is the province in middle Honduras, about a four-hour drive from Tegucigalpa, known as the wild west of Honduras, where ranchers and farmers live. The air is clean, the roads are bad (often slowed by herds of cows or goats), and life is an adventure. "¡Olan chanos son tremendos!" became a catch phrase among the missionaries be cause of the Olanchanos' robust independence (at one point in Honduras's history, Olancho wanted to break off and become its own country), their unwillingness to take a handout, and their enthusiastic response to the gospel. The church-planting efforts exploded there.

But the success in Olancho also exposed an underbelly of need, the most obvious being the lack of trained leadership. "People would get up to preach and started realizing their limitations," says Tom Soerens, who teaches theology at Dordt College, but who served with the CRWM in Honduras for over 13 years. "There was fire and maturity, but they needed training to understand the biblical texts." To address this, Soerens helped expand the work of a seminary in Tegucigalpa for training pastors and church leaders.

But there were other less tangible, but no less glaring, deficiencies. "One of the most crucial areas in leadership training is Christian character development, nurturing truly spiritual leaders who are humble servants," says John Wind. This is not easily done in a land where machismo defines masculine headship.

In a video the Winds use to explain their ministry, they contrast the legacies of North America with South/Central America. Unlike the Pilgrims who settled the Massachusetts Bay area (and elsewhere) with the hopes of building a better life and enjoying religious freedom, the Spanish conquerors came to the Americas to enslave the indigenous populations and take their gold. Rather than working toward a system of government that honored freedoms and individual rights, the Spanish imposed a feudalistic, vertical society, where the have-nots existed to serve the haves; they enforced a hierarchical view of the Catholic church; and they modeled machismo—the conquest and domination (and often abuse) of men over women.

Over time, Spaniards intermarried with Indians and the population began to be filled out by mestizos (the mixing of the two races). The result has been a cultural environment that reflects the dehumanizing effects of the conquest. Rampant infidelity, juvenile delinquency, children born out of wedlock, child abuse, and alcoholism pervade all levels of society in Honduras. These pose a formidable challenge for the success of the Protestant church and the gospel ethic. And these are the areas the Winds targeted in their ministry.

"The Word of God cannot be detained, even by the Devil himself," says Virgilio Reyes, a pastor and evangelist in Olancho. This young Honduran church leader stands out as an example of what the tenacity of the farm ethic can bring to an otherwise uncultivated ministry context.

Reyes was spiritually nurtured and mentored by CRC missionaries who had been living in Olancho. He quickly grew in his leadership qualities and exuded a passion and vision for planting the gospel in this neglected field. His poise and resolve won Reyes the affirmation of the Olancho classes, which selected him in 1989 to start a church in the region's largest city, Juticalpa (pronounced hoo-tee-cal -pah). Up to then, despite being the hub of activity in Honduras's campo (countryside), no CRC presence existed.

John Wind was commissioned by the mission and the national churches to work with Reyes in this church-planting effort. That meant a lot of miles driving back and forth on dusty roads, making the four-hour trip between Tegucigalpa and Olancho. In addition to spending many hours strategizing and praying, Reyes and Wind spent most of their time walking from home to home (that's a lot of walking in the campo), knocking on doors, and inquiring if people would be interested in a Bible study. Many were. And for months, John and Reyes re turned to those homes and held Bible studies, sometimes with only one person (often the mother). In time, they were able to consolidate some of these gatherings, until finally—after five months of networking—they held their first service in Reyes's home. Fifteen people attended, all women.

Eventually the praying, studying, counseling, and walking reached a point of critical mass, and the church took off. By the end of the fourth year, they had purchased desirable property on which to build the church and soon added another building for a school. Today, approximately 151 people attend the church and 80 students attend the school (K–3rd grade, adding a grade every year).

The CRWM and national churches financially supported Reyes in this undertaking, but on a decreasing scale. (It is the mission's policy that local congregations pay the salary of their pastors.) Eventually the church in Juticalpa grew to the place where it could assume responsibility for Reyes's support. (He supplements his income with part-time farming; selling medicines; and, with his wife, running a little store.)

Since the church plant in Juticalpa ten years ago, Reyes has planted seven other daughter churches in the outlying areas. Today there are about 48 churches in Olancho, and he has hopes of seeing more churches planted farther north, along the coast. He says, "If an established church does not begin a daughter church, then that church is navel gazing."

In addition to John's discipleship and church planting ministries, the medical brigades, orchestrated by Shirley Wind and sponsored by the Luke Society (an international health service headquartered in Sioux Falls, S.D.), have proven to have a positive effect on church growth in the countryside. Every year since 1981, she has planned and facilitated the two-week visits of some 40 medical personnel from the U.S., including plastic and orthopedic surgeons, anesthesiologists, pediatricians, OB-GYNs, cardiologists, dentists, RNs, and support personnel, who have worked either in the hospital in Juticalpa or in more rustic areas in remote villages.

Honduran doctor Nestor Salavarria first encountered the North American doctors as a medical student. He helped on a brigade in 1984 for the experience "and also to acquire the medical-type T-shirts," he says.

He was not a Christian but was greatly impressed when the North American doctors helped save the life of one of his patients with an advanced stage of tetanus. They responded with "so much medicine that it was enough for about 50 people."

Over these many years since, Salavarria—who "had an experience with the Lord" shortly after that initial meeting—has won stature and respect in the medical community in Honduras. He runs the Clinic of the Good Shepherd, near Juticalpa, and it has become a critical and significant health-care center in the area, treating over 100 patients daily. He has worked closely with Shirley Wind (who is trained as a nurse) in prearranging the surgeries and setting up the surgery schedule. On average, during their two-week visit, the surgical team would perform over 100 operations, seeing no end to such maladies as club feet, cleft palates, hernias, machete wounds, and burns. The team in the remote villages could treat up to 500 patients a day, many of whom come on horseback or on foot, traveling for days. Shirley recalls a 33-year-old mother bringing her 15 children to one clinic, all malnourished, and a comatose man who was carried in by four friends. As a result of the physical care and evangelistic efforts of these brigades, 15 churches have been started out in the campo.

The Winds brought a "spiritual covering" to the brigade ministry, says Salavarria. Shirley took on the role of spiritual counselor (all patients were assigned one). On one occasion, she met a man who had been shot and, while he was awaiting surgery, asked if she could read some Scripture. He was surly and intended to shoot his assailant after he recovered, but he agreed to let her read.

She read from the Gospels about the crucifixion. Though he didn't accept the Lord, he had tears in his eyes as she read. The next day after his surgery, she asked him again if he would like to give his life to the Lord. This time he said he would. "He wasn't ready to forgive the man who shot him," she says. "But he said he wasn't going to go shoot him."

The Winds together also had overwhelming success in developing a marriage and family ministry. In 1992, they team-taught a seminary class on the topic. The pastors then asked the Winds to come and offer the course in their churches, which was so successful the Winds eventually devoted half of their time to the seminars. They regularly taught a seven-week "Marriage Builder" course in churches in Tegucigalpa and sponsored marriage-retreat weekends throughout Honduras.

"There is no real concept of an intimate relationship as a couple, even if they're Christians," says Efrain Villeda who, with his wife, Olga, now leads the marriage ministry in Juticalpa. "There are so many problems in marriages, like when the wife was raped [in her childhood] by a family member. Even when they marry a Christian man, it is not very good because of the trauma. These retreats cover important themes like communication, sexuality, and marriage conflicts. They help people express their feelings, with God's help."

"The most important thing the Winds have taught us is their testimony as a couple," says Olga Villeda. "The unity and love they transmit to each other give us the idea of what unity looks like."

Two visions for the church
The success of the church-plant projects in Olancho and other parts of the country (there are more than 70 CRC churches in Honduras) enhanced the status of the Protestant church generally and the CRC specifically. "Before, when the government had a meeting for some commission, the evangelicals were never invited," says Gilberto Espinoza. "Now that has changed. Last year [1997] Franklin Graham held conferences at the national stadium and political figures showed up—such as the presidential candidates, members of congress, the mayor, and people who have a major influence on the country," he says.

"The growth of the evangelical church has been great," adds Dinora, his wife. "At one time it was only 10 percent; now evangelicals make up 30 percent of the population in Honduras. Catholics are worried—and are calling them Christians. The presence of the evangelical churches is being noticed, whereas before they had been ignored."

"Clearly the Christian Reformed Church is integrated with these other Christian churches," says Gilberto. "And we should be part of these [governmental] institutions so we can expand the throne of our Lord socially and politically, and not only in the religious aspect."

It is this vision for the role of the evangelical church in Honduras that highlights some of the differences between First Church and the smaller, poorer churches in the countryside.

The Honduran poor don't dream about dining with dignitaries and being invited to sit on the platform at national events. Their passion for the church is more localized, focusing on individuals' salvation in the context of the community under the leadership of the local pastor. "Remember, your appointment is with Christ," says Virgilio Reyes when he visits people. First Church, on the other hand, has envisioned the Reformed churches operating on every level of Honduran society, including the institutional level. This vision seemed reachable and desirable to a church made up of upper-class Hondurans.

As the time approached when the missionaries would withdraw, these differing visions intensified and uncertainty bubbled up. Some in First Church began fearing that the exuberance and independence in the smaller churches might blur their Reformed identity (confusing it with the Pentecostals) and undercut their unity as a denomination. "The Reformed church needs to be strong in its doctrine," says Dinora Espinoza. "We have to be careful so that we have a good testimony before our country."

This fear (real or perceived), in conjunction with the approaching withdrawal deadline predetermined by the CRWM, prompted some leaders in First Church to reclaim their status as the ones who brought the missionaries in the first place. They determined what, in their minds, would be the best course for all the CRC churches, making decisions about the running of the seminary, the status of the church properties, and the role of the missionaries (they did not renew residency visas of some). This, in turn, unnerved some of the other churches, who felt left out of the process.

"The wisdom of what John Wind was doing was confirmed by what happened, positively and negatively," says Tom Soerens. Wind's emphasis on discipleship and "joint accountability," says Soerens, "is not an easy concept to make work in a vertically empowered society. The top-down model is all they know in Honduras, so the covenantal model is more difficult."

So after nearly three decades, the mission of the CRWM in Honduras ended where it began—with the leadership of First Church. And though, as the Winds packed their bags they did so amidst pain and some discord, it remained Shirley's hope that "the chaff [of this conflict] will be blown away, and that what remains will please him."

"Change always produces friction," says Ken Hanna, who is chair of the missions department at Moody Bible Institute and who served overseas for over 30 years in Latin America. The turmoil that erupted between the CRC churches in Honduras, he says, "is not unlike what has happened with any other mission board in other parts of the world."

He uses the Spanish word laguna—gap—to describe what happens. "When a mission goes in, they usually send highly trained people. They are leaders. They can be caring and servant types, but they are still leaders. If you pull a whole group out at one time—even if you do it incrementally—you leave a huge vacuum."

The laguna, he says, is "the vacuum of vision" that exists after the missionaries leave. "The mission knew [when they went in] that they were going to leave." In that respect, preparing for that was their goal. Once they are gone, says Hanna, "the national church is left wondering, 'Now what?' This could result in a fractured vision, and they can become splintered if they can't agree on what their purpose is.

"The national church is at its best," he says, "when it is unified around a single purpose."

After the storm
All of this turmoil between the churches, of course, took place before Hur ri cane Mitch. Before the hurricane, the Winds were encouraging the leadership and hoping to stabilize relationships between churches in the wake of the tumult. After the hurricane, the Winds were digging their church people out of the mud and trying to keep them from emotional and physical collapse under the weight of such devastation.

On the night of October 30, as the members of Jose Arias's church waited and watched the water rise, Shirley Wind says it "rose so rapidly it was like a 15-foot tidal wave." By morning, only four-wheelers could navigate what was left of the roads and had to take circuitous routes to get anywhere since the bridges no longer existed. A little more than a block beyond the church, says John, "We saw the fire department in their rafts rescuing people off their roofs."

Jose Arias, the pastor of the church, had been another of John Wind's disciples. He had met "Mr. John" at the age of 11. Jose learned a "working hard attitude" from John, who mentored and nurtured him "like a father, and I was like his son," he says. Arias, like Virgilio Reyes, was numbered among the first graduating class at the CRC seminary, and today he oversees a congregation-based school of theology in San Jose de La Vega.

The morning after the flood, Shirley Wind recalls, "We could see that the water and mud had risen over the top of the house where pastor Jose lived." Jose and his wife, Norma, and their children lost everything—their refrigerator, their stove, their books, their papers, their clothes, their children's birth certificates, their marriage certificate, his theological library—"everything except their lives," she says. They were numbered among the 141 people from San Jose de La Vega who had to be sheltered in the church, sleeping on benches or on top of the kindergarten tables. The Winds and the other CRC missionaries provided blankets, medicines, food, and water—that is, until their own supplies also ran out.

"We could have been living in a foreign country," says Shirley. "We had to learn everything again—how to cook, how to eat, how to sleep, how to get water."

The CRC churches in other parts of Honduras did not fare much better. Eighty people in Reyes's church in Juticalpa had to live in the school behind the church, their homes either destroyed or filled with mud. Members from an other church in Olancho spent three days living in a cave. Olancho's fertile topsoil was washed away and farmers didn't know where their cows were; all their fences were gone.

People with symptoms like diarrhea, upper respiratory infections, and funguses overwhelmed Nestor Salavarria at the Clinic of the Good Shepherd. His father had lived in one of the areas hardest hit and suffered a fatal stroke while trying to unplug a drain. So on top of his added duties at the clinic, Salavarria also had to bury his father.

Words like apocalyptic and catastrophic appeared regularly in news reports about the situation in Honduras. Some Hondurans asked, "What is God trying to say to us?" Others wondered if God was "cleaning" the country of its corruption. Still others said it was a test for the young Protestant church.

But most—including the members of the church in San Jose de La Vega, the members of the churches in Olancho, the members of First Church, and the missionaries—were simply trying to make it through another day. And in that respect, the hurricane became the great equalizer, and surviving it became the "unifying purpose" around which the CRC churches could rally. Churches that had been alienated by strife before Mitch pulled together and helped each other after the storm. The pastor from First Church visited Jose Arias many times, bringing food and clothing, asking what he needed and how First Church could serve him and his church.

"Everybody needed help. Everybody got help," says Shirley. So in a strange way, the hurricane overturned the social dynamics that contributed to the inter-church strife: The churches emerged unified as a healing and life-giving force.

One day shortly after the flood, the people at San Jose de La Vega noticed water gurgling up from beneath the steps of the church. At first, they thought it was part of the flooding and needed to be plugged up. But soon they realized the water was fresh and potable—emanating from a natural underground spring. No water was flowing into homes through faucets because the city pipes had been damaged and, for a long time, water trucks could not get bottled water into some neighborhoods because the bridges were out. But fresh water came forth from beneath the steps of the church at San Jose de La Vega. The church members shared their miracle with the whole neighborhood.

They could not have explained why God chose their church steps to be the fountainhead of that fresh-water spring amidst so much need. But they shared their blessing and gave the glory to God. This unexpected miracle in the midst of equally unexpected devastation helped them to live with this simple truth: The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.

The same could be said of the missionaries. Says Gilberto Espinoza: "A lot of missionaries have come to help us, and gone. They have left their grain of sand; some a little, some a lot."

Before the Winds left in February 1999 (delayed for two months because of the hurricane), John recounted that "this year has probably been the most difficult of all our years in Honduras," between the internal strife and the devastation of the hurricane. As a gesture of good will, the members of First Church honored the Winds with a service of appreciation and a wooden cross. "We thank the Lord for bringing us through these difficulties and giving us peace and joy as we leave Honduras."

The Macedonians asked Paul in a vision, "Come over here and help us" (Acts 16:9, NLT). The Honduran Christians asked the same of the CRWM, and the Winds answered that call. And as the Spirit alerted Paul when it was time to move on, the Winds have been so alerted, and have answered that call too.

Jose Arias said their leaving was like "pulling a carrot from the earth—when people come and learn the culture and learn to love and settle here, when you take them away, it hurts."

"People are important but not indispensable," adds Virgilio Reyes. "God is going to keep his kingdom. If we do not have the same missionary spirit of the Winds, God's Word is not going to stop. We feel it deep in our hearts that they are leaving because they are like family. But if it is God's will that they go, we're going to go on, with God's help. The Word of God cannot be detained," he says.

The Winds are now serving in Mexico. When their brothers and sisters in the Honduran churches said their good-byes, they told the Winds: "God wants you to go to Mexico. We pray for you as you go. You have to go, because God has called you."

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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