Iglesia Evangelica Menonita Hondureña, Honduras

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Congregations	136
Membership	4.750
Presiding Officer	Insert Presiding Officer Here
Address	Apartado Postal 77 La Ceiba Atlantida, HONDURAS.
Phone	(502) 441-2663
E-mail	iemh@hondusoft.com
Website	Insert Website Here

La Iglesia Evangélica Menonita Hondureña fue fundada por misioneros de Eastern Mennonite Missions, quienes llegaron al norte de la costa Hondureña en 1950. Esta obra misionera empezó cerca de la amplia zona bananera en las ciudados de La Ceiba, Trujillo, y San Pedro Sula y sus alrededores. Muchas, pero no todas, de las 136 congregaciones están localizadas en estas áreas.

Historias

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Historia

La conferencia tiene sus orígenes desde 1950 con la llegada de los primeros misioneros menonitas. Desde el comienzo, los misioneros no solo se enfocaron en compartir el evangelio sino también respondieron a las necesidaded físicas de la gente, ayudándolas en el área de agricultura, educación, salud, y desarrollo comunitario. Durante la década de los 60, la transición de líderes extrangeros a nacionales ocurrió, y en e1969 las congregaciones se juntaros para crear la conferencia.

La Iglesia ha tenido un trabajo fuerte con refugiados salvadoreños de la guerra. Otras prioridades incluyen desarrollo comunitario y capacitación de líderes. La Iglesia es miembra del Congreso Mundial Menonita.

Orígenes

Beginnings of La Iglesia Evangelica Menonita Hondureña (IEMH)

The presence of Protestant Christianity in Honduras is rather limited. The first Protestant organization to enter Honduras was the Central American Mission in 1896. By the 1920s, other Protestant churches had emerged and were able to expand alongside the sizable presence of the United Fruit Company, which by 1924 owned 87,000 acres of land in Honduras. However, the presence of Protestants in Honduras was relatively small; in 1950 there were just 4,000 Protestants, but by 1967 that number grew to 18,000.

In 1950, North American Mennonites from the East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church in Lancaster, PA discussed the possibility of starting mission work in Central America. Church members reached out to the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions (EMBM) to consider various locations to establish a mission. EMBM president Henry Garber and East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church member Jacob E. Brubaker toured the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras. After seeing the living conditions on the northern coast of Honduras, the two men recommended Honduras as the location to establish a Mennonite missionary presence. Among the problems they saw in northern Honduras were malnutrition, tuberculosis, a lack of medicine, and a school attendance rate of less than half. At the time, Honduras was one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and this was especially true for its northern, coastal region. Thus, when the Mennonite Church was established in Honduras, the primary focus was placed on the northern part of the country.

Two missionaries from the East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church, Grace and George Miller, arrived in Trujillo, Honduras in May 1950. In August 1951, Dora Taylor came to Honduras and served as a nurse for a medical clinic. The first church was constructed in the fall of 1952. The second permanent missionary couple, James and Beatrice Hess, arrived in Honduras in December 1952 and established Mennonite missions in Puerto Castillo, Santa Fe, San Antonio, and Guadalupe. Throughout the rest of the 1950s, the EMBMC focused on establishing churches, medical clinics, and mission homes for the missionaries. Both missionaries and Hondurans viewed the medical clinics as essential to meeting the needs of the community and establishing trust between missionaries and Hondurans. In 1956, in the small town of Tocoa, a former United Fruit Company town, the Mennonite medical clinic served roughly 2,400 patients. In Sava in 1960, Mennonites constructed a chapel and a medical clinic, which served over 5,000 patients. The recently established Mennonite churches in the 1950s were rather small, such as the 24-member church in Santa Fe in 1953. The Mennonite missionaries taught the gospel to the Hondurans they met from their Mennonite perspective, and in order to provide better education and training for Hondurans in Mennonite faith they opened a Bible institute in 1960. By the 1960s, though, the focus of the Mennonite missionaries shifted from establishing more churches and clinics to shifting leadership to native Hondurans, a process that proved long and challenging.

Timeline

1950 - Mennonites from Lancaster send the first missionaries to northern Honduras to establish the Mennonite church. Mennonites became the only permanent, evangelical Christian presence in Trujillo.

1956 - Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities establishes a mission home, chapel, and medical clinic in Tocoa. The medical clinic served about 2,400 patients that year.

1960 - In response to both a lack of training and means of transportation for Honduran Christians, the EMBMC established a mobile Bible institute in 1960.

1964 - Francisco Flores and his wife became the first Honduran, licensed co-pastors. They still shared responsibility with missionaries.

1965 - The Mission Council of the EMBMC, comprised of missionaries, was dissolved and absorbed by the church organization in Honduras. This was one of the first steps in transitioning authority from the North American missionaries to the Honduran church members.

1969 - The constitution for la Iglesia Evangelica Menonita Hondureña (Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church), was approved. The power shift away from missionaries to Honduran Mennonites was not instantaneous, though.

1969 - La Guerra del Fútbol (The Soccer War) between Honduras and El Salvador broke out over contested borderland, resulting in the deaths of 3,000 people and the loss of homes for 38,000 Salvadorans. Members of the Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church did volunteer work and distributed food, clothing, and medicine for some of the 50,000 Salvadoran victims that entered Honduras due to the conflict.

1970 - La Iglesia Evangelica Menonita Hondureña received full legal status. Property like church buildings, medical clinics, and housing shifted legally to the Hondurans.

1973 - North American Mennonite missionaries Edward and Gloria King started an evangelistic outreach to Honduran youth in Tegucigalpa. They started Bible studies and recreation programs, helping even ex-drug addicts. Throughout the next ten years, their work continued without a formal meeting place. This ministry became known as Amor Viviente (Living Love).

1978 - La Iglesia Evangelica Menonita Hondureña granted separate legal status to Amor Viviente, although funding from the Salunga (Pennsylvania) Mission Board continued to send financial support. Amor Viviente considered itself non-denominational as a neo-Pentecostal church, thus “Mennonite” was not included in the name.

1980-late 1980s - Significant numbers of Salvadoran refugees began entering Honduras. The Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church and MCC were both involved in efforts to aid the refugees; in 1982 they consolidated their efforts to better coordinate as a single, Mennonite entity. Beginning in June 1984, the Mennonite Church (both MCC and IEMH) was placed in charge of the coordination of construction and maintenance of infrastructure in the camps of Mesa Grande and Colomoncagua. Mennonites and Catholics joined together in 1985 to hold worship services for refugees. The refugee crisis had lessened somewhat by the late 1980s with more refugees leaving than entering camps such as Mesa Grande in 1987, when there was an average of 90 repatriations to just 21 entries.

1987 - The Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church along with the Franconia Mennonite Conference (Pennsylvania) founded Proyecto MAMA, Mujeres Amigas Millas Aparte (Women Friends Miles Apart). The vision of the MAMA project was and still is to construct a wall of protection around children who were born into poverty. It works to provide both formal and informal education and to strengthen individual and community values.

1993 - The Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church helped to form the Christian Civic Movement that worked to end the clause in the Honduran constitution that made military service mandatory.

1995 - On April 5, 1995 the Honduran government abolished the clause in its constitution that mandated compulsory military service. The Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church was integrally involved in the process of appealing to the government to change the constitution in the years leading up to the change and was a significant factor in the decision

1997 - The MAMA project established the Community Center for School Tutoring and Special Attention as a response to problems with special education in Honduras, where 5 in 10 students demonstrate signs of learning disabilities, yet few receive appropriate help. This program provides instruction on dealing with learning disabilities as teachers and parents. It also teaches an average of 130 students in an individualized manner.

1999 - The Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church formed the Peace and Justice Project, working with past and current gang members in efforts to rehabilitate. The IEMH established this program in response to the abusive and violent practices of the government against gang members. The government had been arresting thousands of teens and young adults on the suspicion of being gang members. The Peace and Justice Project also provides HIV/AIDs education in hopes of preventing its spread. There are currently five staff members and 20 volunteers in three northern Honduras regions. MCC contributes approximately $38,000 per year to support the work of the program. Ricardo Torres, of MCC, works with the Delinquent Youth Recuperation Program of the Peace and Justice Project. He has personally helped 20 young people turn around their lives through visiting gang members in hospitals and prisons. Soccer games and community clean up efforts are an avenue for workers in Peace and Justice to talk about improving gang members’ self-esteem and resolving conflict nonviolently.

2009 - In response to the coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church called for church leaders to avoid further polarizing Honduran society. The church responded to the deaths of two Hondurans and the injury of dozens of others by asking for Christians to search for peace, not polarization. Also, the IEMH called on government authorities respect human rights of all Hondurans. In a statement, the IEMH asked for the Honduran people to “live together in diversity of thought and political ideology, seeking the true meaning of democracy, where everyone can live in harmony and respect each other, turning the conflict into an opportunity to… create a more just society with equal opportunities.”

Vida Contemporánea

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Personas importantes en la vida de la iglesia

Mennonite Identity

The Honduran Evangelical Mennonite Church practices many of the beliefs that were integral to the Anabaptists of the 16th century. This has been demonstrated in the way Honduran Mennonites have resisted violence and actively resisted the law that previously made military service compulsory. Their legislative victory in 1995 was a testament to their peace witness as a national church. Another key theological similarity between 16th century Anabaptists and present day Honduran Mennonites is an emphasis on community, which is apparent in the tradition of weekly or biweekly youth group meetings for young adults ranging from pre-teen to until marriage. In Tegucigalpa, the church has monthly Friday prayer meetings and occasional day or weekend-long retreats for various groups of church members.

A much different, but perhaps equally important way of demonstrating the value of community is the manner of responding to human suffering. Just as 16th century Anabaptists believed in an economy of common goods, where no one went hungry or suffered innocently, the IEMH has also embodied these beliefs. The IEMH’s value of community was clear in its response to the suffering of Salvadoran refugees in the 1970s and 1980s, when it provided food, shelter, finances, and spiritual outreach. This was equally true for the 1990s when the IEMH participated in demonstrations on the streets and hunger strikes opposing the government’s law of compulsory military service.

Fostering Mennonite Identity

In the early 1980s, there was an effort to learn the Anabaptist roots of their religion amongst many Central American Mennonites. As a result, Mennonite leaders created the Latin American Anabaptist Seminary, SEMILLA, in Guatemala City, to foster growth and provide theological training in the Anabaptist tradition for Mennonite pastors. SEMILLA continues to provide education for eight Central American countries, including Honduras. However, in the past decade, the emphasis on theological connections to the Anabaptist faith tradition appears to have waned. No longer are all of the pastors preaching an Anabaptist theology; rather, many are more concerned with the numerical growth of their congregation and many are preaching a theology of prosperity, an influence of other Evangelical denominations upon the Mennonite tradition in Honduras. Also, after a strong witness for the suffering of the poor throughout the 1980s and efforts in the 1990s to eliminate compulsory military service, the IEMH has been somewhat inactive lately on a national level.

At the same time, though, the IEMH has continued to profess a commitment to peace and justice issues. This was clear in their response to the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya, when the IEMH called for Hondurans to treat each other with respect and love, rather than in polarizing and hateful ways. Also, the existence of the Peace and Justice Project and the MAMA Project both speak to Honduran Mennonites’ concern for social justice issues and the plight of the poor.

Honduran Mennonites maintain contact with one another on a theological level through a national, annual youth retreat and leadership meetings for pastors and delegates throughout the country. National church offices of organizations such as Peace and Justice and MCC also provide connection for Mennonites within the country. The IEMH is part of CAMCA (Consulta Anabautista Menonita Centro Americana, or the Central American Anabaptist-Mennonite Conference), which includes the Central American countries of Belize, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. CAMCA meets once a year, each time in a different country, and serves to promote dialogue amongst Mennonites throughout Central America.

Major Challenges Facing IEMH

IEMH is not currently growing at the rate of other churches, and is smaller than the church that branched off it in the 1980s, Amor Viviente. Theological identity is an underlying issue that may challenge the church in the future. Some associate the gospel of health and wealth to a church with the capability to grow, while others see this as a separation from the Mennonite ideology the church is based on. Also, the IEMH faces difficulties in adequately training its leaders, especially in rural regions where many people have felt the call to ministry but lack formal instruction. Another issue is the role of women in the church. The expectation for male members is that they will form part of the local church leadership, which consists of the pastor, elders, deacons, and administrator. Women, while valued members of the congregation, are not assumed to take the same positions. Rather, they are more often assumed to become Sunday School teachers and compose the majority of the teachers. How this plays out in the future could have a powerful impact on the size and growth of the congregation.

Vision for the Future

Whether or not the church will move away from its Anabaptist-Mennonite roots and become absorbed by new theological currents, such as that of prosperity, is yet to be seen. The IEMH has members that take various stances on how the church should be a prophetic voice in responding to injustice, with some members supporting and other opposing. On the other hand, the IEMH could become an even stronger voice for peace and justice that works against governmental corruption, poverty, and gang violence. Leaders in the church express desire for the beliefs and values of Anabaptism to be passed down to future generations so that the church may continue as a witness of peace, justice, community, and the teachings of Jesus.

Recursos Electrónicos

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Bibliografía anotada

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Archivos y Bibliotecas

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Links Externos

http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/I4423.html