121025 Hispanic Ministry Report

To the Rappahannock Baptist Association at the Fall Meeting

Kilmarnock Baptist Church, Kilmarnock VA

The week before last Gabi, a dear friend whom we’ve come to know and love (and with whom we’ve shared her growing family) sent me a message asking if I’d be willing to take her up to the Mexican Consulate in DC so she and her husband could renew their passports. After checking my calendar, I told her I’d be glad to.

Gabi is unique, as any of us are unique individuals. But there is one thing that sets her apart in my mind, from a good many of the other women we have come to know. She is from the Federal District of Mexico – the equivalent of our District of Columbia, but it’s not that. She completed High School and if I remember correctly, has done some of her undergraduate work. Though that is relatively rare among the folks we work with, hers is not the only instance of that being the case. What sets her apart is her demeanor – or her manner, I should say. She is confident, self-assured, and speaks to us as we prefer – as equals.

I’m used to being addressed as “Don” Kenny, or “Padre” Kenny, or simply “Padre”. Which I think I’ve shared with you before is just a bit unsettling coming from a Baptist identity in terms of my role as Pastor and to be addressed as ‘Father’ – I appreciate the intent and the respect with which it is used, though the ecclesiastical label that resonates of hierarchy chafes a bit on these Congregationalist ears.

Gabi doesn’t call me by any of those titles. To her, I am just ‘Kenny’. It may not seem like much, but it is significant enough to my mind to give me a sense of relief when I speak to her and hear it from her. In thinking about it,  I think what I’ve come to understand about the underlying dynamic that that speaks to IS that sense of equality – that I – that WE – try to communicate in the work of the ministry is in essence what Paul touches on in his letter to the Galatians – about there being neither Jew nor Greek, Slave nor free, male nor female – that in Christ we are all brothers and sisters on equal footing.

Time and again, people asking me to intercede in prayer for them have approached me, and in the course of the request, the reason is stated as being ‘God hears your prayers for SURE.’ That self-disassociation that happens when someone tells themselves that God is not as attentive to their prayers, so they should go find someone who God WILL listen to, is a terribly sad thing. It tells me that their understanding of God is of a God who gauges their worthiness by a measure other than the self-giving, self-sacrificing love that God showed himself to BE in the person of Jesus Christ.

But when Gabi talks to me and addresses me as simply ‘Kenny’, or calls Leslie, ‘Leslie’, there is an underlying understanding that that egalitarian impulse of the Gospel is there. I realize that for the most part, the titles used to address me are more signs of respect, but in a significant number – perhaps a majority of those cases, it is more, and goes deeper, than simply respect – it speaks to a view of our roles as being different because of what we do – that because I am a minister and a pastor I have an inside track on God – a direct line.

That is something that I have to constantly be disavowing. Many of the folks who are regulars at our gatherings – who’ve become that ‘core congregation’, as it were, have begun to grasp the concept. In part because Leslie and I don’t pretend to be something we’re not. We share with them our own struggles: our hardships and challenges in raising a family, keeping food on the table making ends meet and raising a family. They’ve watched us weather losses and hardships, health challenges and the stuff of life that gets thrown at anyone. And we’ve been there to sit beside them when THEY have gone through those same experiences; to pray together for strength and courage, peace and comfort for whatever it is.

A few weeks ago I drove to an address just off River Road in Lancaster to pick up Isidra Arellanes to either bring her to a gathering or to take her to get her driver’s license. She and her family welcomed Leslie and me to their home in Chimalhuacan on our first trip to Mexico back in 2005, and she hosted the construction team that my friend Don Bell and I met up with that June when we built the rooms for Romualda, her neighbor.  Isidra and I have a similar relationship to the one we have with Gabi, in terms of how we refer to each other. But our relationship with Isidra has had more opportunities to deepen, to the point where we consider each other family. We’d been in touch several times over the phone, and our conversation picked up where it left off. I asked her how her sister in law was doing now, spiritually, five years out from having lost her husband when he drowned trying to come across the border. Isidra’s answer was affirming: she told me ‘Mine has learned to depend on God – her faith was always strong, but it has grown stronger over these last five years – because there were times when no one could be there for her BUT God.’ … Isidra paused, and then, kind of from out of the blue, she said ‘Kenny, if I knew I could come and go, rather than depend on being on a contract’, I would be a Baptist.’ In my mind I thought ‘you already are.’ What she was saying was about her identity, and how that ties into what she’d call destiny.

There is a freedom that comes in knowing Christ that releases you from preconceived notions of what your place in society is, what you are able to do, and what you are not supposed to do. I think that is what Isidra was speaking of. What I am hoping she’ll understand is that that freedom is not dependent on a label, but on the relationship that is living and growing in her with God through Christ.

Gabi and her husband Chevo are getting their passports taken care of in order to get things in process to request their children’s passports and documentation, and then to get them registered as Mexican citizens because sometime in the next few months they will be moving back home to Mexico. When I think about that I get a knot in my stomach, because I know I’ll be saying goodbye to another family that have come to be very dear to me – to us. There is sorrow at that prospect, but there is also a knowledge that they are going back having come to know and see an expression of faith – not just through us – but others in the community and in the Association – that embodies a God who loves and cares and gives in a way that says faith is a way of life, not just a set of propositions, it is a living thing, not a dusty set of rituals.

Thank you for helping us do that and be that, by being that yourselves.