By Kim Frederick
Meeting with Pastor Miguel and the water board in Las Delicias.Getting a chance to talk with Ron Bueno, ENLACE's founder and Executive Director, and hear his passion for the local church is exciting to say the least. Meeting with the pastors and church leaders who are working with ENLACE and realizing the vision of community transformation is also incredibly inspiring. However, to visit communities and meet the pastors with Ron Bueno as a guide and translator is downright invigorating, and the excitement becomes contagious. I had the opportunity to be a part of such an experience during a recent vision trip involving various church leaders from Colorado.
The team met with several local pastors, pastors who have stepped away from an attitude of separatism and have embraced an attitude of service and community transformation. One pastor, Miguel Duran, admitted that his church used to keep to itself and shunned involvement with community efforts. His church had even been accused of being a “parasite of the community” before it listened to God’s call to love and serve its neighbors. Amazingly, Pastor Miguel is now a prominent leader in his community and the head of the water board which is overseeing a project that will one day provide clean water to thousands of people in his area.
Visiting a tilapia farm in the community of El EspinoWe also met with a friend of Miguel Duran, Pastor Felix, who was once a critic of the pastors who chose to reach out to their communities, but is now also effectively partnering with his community in development efforts. Through Ron's vibrant translating, Pastor Felix told us that he had been a pastor for years before he finally understood that the gospel was not just something to be contained or kept in the church. It is alive, he said, and we have to live it out. He beamed as he showed us some of the tomatoes that were a product of his community’s home garden initiatives.
Restoring relationships is a phrase often used by ENLACE staff when explaining ENLACE’s approach to community transformation. Before, I thought this was just a creative way of saying that ENLACE trains church leaders to collaborate with others in efforts of community development. It was not until sitting in on community meetings with members from various churches and different walks of life, hearing testimonies and stories of reconciled neighbors and of lives saved through selfless serving, that idealist phrases such as “restoring relationships” and “community transformation” became tangible realities to me. The experience of these realties is what would prompt Mark Orphan, the Missions and Outreach Pastor of the Timberline Church, to say with confidence, "Of all the missions organizations I’ve worked with, I’ve never seen one more strategic in their approach and well-suited for a transforming partnership with US churches."
It is exciting to meet so many churches that are heeding a call to service and reaching out sacrificially, despite their own poverty and needs. Through meetings with these incredible individuals and visits to Pastor Felix showing off the tomatoes of his home gardentheir communities, leaders from the Timberline and Parker Christian Center churches were able to better understand what it means to be a link which “equips churches to transform their communities.” I think it would be difficult to come here, see the work being done through the churches, and not catch the vision. For me, it is like a hardball to the chest that leaves me with a tremendous desire to be a part of the excitement, and an immeasurable thankfulness that, in some small way, I am.
If your church is interested in becoming a partner with ENLACE, and would like to learn more by coming to El Salvador for a vision trip, please contact partner@enlaceonline.org for more information.
