September 22, 2009

Dear Friends,

September is always the month of getting things started again, and our new semester at San Pablo Seminary has begun very well. There is a great new class of incoming students, 18 for theology and 11 in music. One young man, Juan Quintero, is our first student from the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Chile. I was able to help a bit in bringing Juan to Yucatan, working with the partnership of that church and PC(USA)’s Presbytery of the Pines. Juan is a fine young man with a strong desire to serve the Lord in pastoral ministry. We ask your prayers for him and all the new students.

Don and Martha Wehmeyer with friends in Chiapas. Martha is wearing a hand-woven huipil that was given to her.

Another wonderful bit of news at the seminary is that Valerie, our eldest daughter, has just about finished her master’s degree in Latin American literature (she has to complete a final exam in October), so she was able to come home and has been teaching the Greek class at San Pablo since August. She is having such a great time teaching and using innovative methods for learning languages that I almost want to re-learn Greek too. 

I also want to share that Martha and I led 12 brothers and sisters from the Door of Salvation Church, where I am the supply pastor, to Tenejapa, Chiapas. This is a large Tzeltal town. We taught vacation Bible school for three days and spent another day painting a nearby church. For those of you who have made short-term mission trips, you know how quickly brothers and sisters become attached to one another. On leaving, there were enough tears to float Noah’s ark once again.

Don Wehmeyer cleaning corn with Tzeltal women.

Another man I want to introduce you to is Pastor Freddy Gomez. He has been a pastor for over 25 years and lives in Las Margaritas, Chiapas, with his wife and children  His eldest daughter, Alba, is a fourth-year student at San Pablo. I mention Pastor Freddy because I am working with him and a few others to begin a retreat center in Chiapas. Pastor Freddy was a catechist in the Roman Catholic Church until he started reading the Bible; he then became a Presbyterian when he was about 20. The plans we are putting before the Lord is to continue the women’s ministry we have started here in Yucatan at the new center in Chiapas. The National Presbyterian Church of Mexico has no women pastors or elders, but we are working to reestablish the Diaconate Order, somewhat as the Lutheran and Reformed Churches did in nineteenth-century Europe. It is a curiosity to me that Presbyterian Churches in the United States can actually decide not to have a deaconate. This was one of the cornerstones of the work of John Calvin and precisely what made Geneva in the sixteenth century a charitable, clean, well-ordered city that drew church leaders from all over the world. Since the Ascension, the Word made flesh is best seen in diaconal ministry. For people interested in world mission, I see no way in which we can avoid being involved in deaconate ministries. I would love to correspond with anyone interested in this subject.

Before I close let me add a few great lines from the “Vision of Sir Launfal,” by James Russell Lowell. It is Christ who is speaking at this point in the poem.

Not what we give, but what we share,
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three:—
Himself, his hungry neighbor, and Me.

Since our baptism we rejoice in having been made a part of the Body of Christ.

The 2009 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 275