Questions and Answers
 about the 
Maya Quiché/Heartland Presbytery
Guatemala Partnership

Q:    Who or what is Maya Quiché?

Maya Quiché Presbytery was the first indigenous presbytery in what is now the National Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Guatemala. Organized in 1959, it made it possible for Mayan Presbyterians to participate in the governance of the church in their native language rather than the dominant Spanish.

Maya Quiché Presbytery, with headquarters in Quetzaltenango (Xela), includes approximately 30 churches. Located from the south coast to the western highlands, the churches are primarily Mayan in heritage. Although presbytery meetings today are conducted in Spanish, some church members still speak on the indigenous Quiché language.

Q:    What is the connection between Heartland Presbytery & Maya Quiché Presbytery?

The two presbyteries signed the first partnership agreement in 1995, after several years of exploratory conversations. That agreement was renewed in 1998. Ours has been a "partnership of presence". Visitors from Heartland Presbytery travel to Guatemala at least once a year to visit with churches and meet with presbytery leaders. The primary goal of these trips is to establish and deepen relationships between Presbyterians in the Heartland and Presbyterians in Guatemala.

Partnership trips are designed to help us learn from faithful Presbyterians from another culture. We do not visit our partners in Maya Quiché to "help" them, but to learn from them and to share with them our own faith and life experiences. Those who meet our Guatemalan brothers and sisters are humbled by their deep faith, warm hospitality, and boundless generosity.

Our presbytery partnership intends to bring a delegation from Maya Quiché Presbytery to visit churches and leaders here at least once a year. In that way we can return their hospitality and allow more people in the Heartland to hear the faith stories and experience the powerful witness of our Guatemala partners.

Q:    How can we participate in the partnership?


   

Sept. 29,2002

John 17: 20-25

 

Partners in Christ

 

The impetus for forming a partnership with Presbyterians in Central America came as an outgrowth of the Gift of New Eyes program in the early 1980’s where delegations from our presbytery traveled to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras to learn of the political, social economic and cultural struggles people of faith in those countries were undergoing.  We met people of great faith who were questioning the role of the church as it interfaced with the almost overwhelming problems of the poor, the marginalized people of those countries.

We often felt like tourists going for a couple of weeks listening, grieving, hurting with those folks, and then disappearing. We felt that we and our Presbytery would have much to gain if we had ongoing, recurring exchanges.  Guatemala was the only Central American country with a national Presbyterian church. So we pursued a Partnership within the National Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Guatemala starting 1991.  The general Assembly had commissioned a national office for that purpose.

On our first trip to Guatemala we were impressed by one Presbytery, the Maya Quiché Presbytery which is located around Quetzaltenango in the highlands, but also has several churches on the western coast of Guatemala.  It was one of 14 Presbyteries in Guatemala.  Seven of those Presbyteries are ladino.  They are Spanish speaking, and are people of Spanish and European descent. The other seven are of indigenous Mayan descent.  These presbyteries are not geographically based, but instead are language based.  Quiché is one of the 22 Mayan dialects spoken in Guatemala.

I would like to read excerpts from the partnership Agreement with the Maya Quiche Presbytery of Guatemala:

Having discovered that our own faith expressions are limited by our culture and our vision, we feel the need to express our Presbyterian connectionalism as well as our oneness in Christ with sisters and brothers in Central America and in North America in ways that are concrete, specific, personal and meaningful.   We affirm our common faith in Jesus Christ, and our mutual commitment to the Reformed faith and the Presbyterian form of Government.  We affirm being equal in the image and likeness of God, in spite of our cultural differences. Through our exchange of faith, through the development of personal and church friendships, through our exposure to diverse culture, and through our struggle with different languages, we come to recognize our common humanity and shared responsibility.

In the initial meetings set to explore this partnership we were greeted with some skepticism.  They wanted to know if we intended to come down and try to evangelize them, or tell them how to run their church.  That was the style during the conquest period and the colonial period.  Even in modern times as late as the early 80’s the indigenous Presbyterians could serve on the committees and council of the national synod, but did not have a vote.  Indeed we found that there is considerable an deep prejudice against the indigenous peoples in Guatemala as a whole.  They have been purposely and systematically denied education.  Mission schools were the only place they could get an education until recently.  During the 40-year civil war the vast majority of the disappeared were Mayans, and all the 440 villages that were victims of the scorched earth policy were Mayan.  There were numerous death threats from the death squads aimed at indigenous Presbyterian pastors.  The church itself has a long history of inequality and prejudice.

So it soon became apparent to us that our first task was just to emphasize our oneness in Christ.  We do that by visiting the 30 churches and 3 congregations of the presbytery.  We attend their worship services, which are often more Pentecostal in style than in the reformed style.  We accept their gracious hospitality, we eat their food that is laboriously prepared for us over an open fire, often grinding the corn for tortillas with stones, and cooking the tamales wrapped in banana leaves.  We have come to understand that our mission is one of presence.

I would like to share two stories which illustrate what I mean.  We were visiting churches on the coast and some of the churches were up on the steep slopes of a volcano.  Our tour bus could not make the climb.  We got into the back of a cattle truck and were hauled up the mountain.  At one of the churches we stopped to visit, the pastor was not aware that we were coming.  He was working in a nearby coffee field.  Children were sent to bring him.  He spoke no Spanish so our translation had to go from English to Spanish to Quiché.  He was astonished that we took the time and made the effort to come to his remote church.  He was grateful for our coming. then as we were taking our leave he said,  “It is only by the grace of God that you are here.”  A year later we were visiting another church located deep in the heart of a plantation.  We had to walk in a about a quarter of a mile.  The pastor led us in a Bible study.  We went with him to make calls on two of his parishioners who were sick, and prayed for them.  When we returned to the church one of the elders who had accompanied us, asked if we would please honor him by coming to his home.  He seemed very passionate about it.  So we did.  He introduced us to his wife, his son’s family and his daughters family who also had houses on his property.  The houses were thatched roofed and dirt floors, meager in furnishings.  But he was proud to have us in his home.  When we took our leave, he raised his hands and in a trembling voice, with tears in his eyes, he said, “ It is only by the grace of God that you are here.”  The same phrase as a year earlier.  It was to him as if God was affirming his dignity and worth through our presence.  We had broken down the walls of class and prejudice simply by our physical presence and by that invisible yet tangible sense of brotherhood and oneness in Jesus Christ.

Last year we sponsored a special trip between our Presbyterian Women and the Presbyterial of Maya Quiché, and they also attended the women’s synod meeting.  At that meeting there was a mother with a 4-year-old boy that had a high temperature.  One of our delegates was a nurse.  She took the mother and the boy into the only air conditioned motel in the small town and gave him aspirin and bathed him in cool water all night long and then paid for him to be seen in the local clinic the next day.  The kindness and concern for the boy is an experience that neither she nor the mother will ever forget.  The oneness in Christ was visibly shown in that town as the women paraded their banners throughout the village.

One of my favorite stories is of Marge Carpenter, a past Moderator of the General Assembly, I think in the mid 90’s.  She visited Guatemala during her term as moderator.  She and three others drove to a remote village that had been the scene of massacres and was over run first by the insurgents, then the army, the rebels, then the army.   As their jeep came chugging up the mountain and entered the village, all the villagers ran.  By the time they stepped out of the jeep no one was in sight.  After a few minutes one woman peered around the corner of a house and called out Presbyterianos?  Presbyterianos?  They nodded and said, Sí, Sí.  Then the villagers reappeared and greeted them.  Marge asked how did you know we were Presbyterianos?  She said, Presbyterianos are the only Anglos brave enough to come to our village.  What a testimony to the Presbyterian presence in Guatemala.

Now for our part, we always come away feeling we have gained more than anyone.  There are many for whom the trip has been a turning point in their life.  Not for everyone, but for many.  Our trips are not just a tour, not sightseeing.  It has aspects of a spiritual retreat.  Even though most of us don’t understand the Spanish or the Quiché that is spoken and sung in the worship services, we feel the spirit of Christ moving among those people, we feel the joy and commitment of their faith. We feel a oneness and a connectedness to God’s vision (care) for the world that we cannot feel nor sense in our comfortable, homogenous churches.  There is always someone in our group who connects in a special way with someone there.   We who are privileged to go several times develop lasting friendships.   We come away overwhelmed by the privileged status we have simply by being born in these United States.  We see children as young as 4 or 5 out early in the morning gathering sticks and scraps of wood and carrying them in big bundles on their backs, so that they will be able to have a daily ration of a couple of tortillas.  We have sponsored visits to the United States of Women from the Presbyterial, youth to the Youth Tri-ennium, officers of the presbytery, and youth to our presbytery.   Each year we have a trip.  Our next one will be, we hope, sometime in March or April.  Our trips are open to anyone in the Presbytery.  The invitation is open.  Anyone who wants to be a part of Christ’s prayer that we all may be one is encouraged to go.