Reconciliation in an "Almost-failed" church

 

My first visit to the rural city of Coxim in Mato Grosso do Sul in Western Brazil confirmed every negative opinion I had heard about this place.

 Close by, the expansive Pantanal spreads all the way to the Paraguay River. The Pantanal is one of the largest swampy places in the world. I had heard about the flies zooming down around the food in Coxim, but not the other challenges I would meet. 

Once a flourishing church with a private Baptist school, the church had fallen headlong into a miserable state. The school closed following the abrupt departure of most church members from worship services. The three-hour direct bus service from Campo Grande to Coxim was extended an extra hour, or more if it was a "pinga-pinga" service. Pinga was a kind of beer. Pinga-pinga meant the bus stopped at each and any dirt entrance to the fazendas. Cattle raising is the chief occupation there. An extra hour was well worth the investment of time if you wanted to meet rural people in the northern part of the state. 

A new military man had come as a trainer of army recruits, and he asked me to be there at 2:00 pm sharp at the military base. I had never spoken to a room full of 60 new recruits. The topic given to me was unique: "Christian Beliefs!" The memory of dozens of flies circling the rice and beans on my lunch plate quickly left as I spoke to those young men. If I made dozens of mistakes in Portuguese, they didn't show it in facial gestures. Amos, the wonderful Black Brazilian, also had me go on the radio each time I went. He carried on the 15 minutes, daily programs. What happened there next was mostly because of him.

The church services had been canceled, so I simply visited every home I could find that was associated with Coxim Baptist Church. 

Two weeks later, I arrived early on Saturday morning and went to visit one of the two elderly women still faithful to the Lord in that congregation. She lived in a spread-out, beautifully decorated, ranch-style house with gorgeous flowering plants inside and outside. I prayed with her and asked about her ten children, unable to fix each name with the current family status, numerous grandchildren, and where they all lived. 

Leaving her home, I almost bumped into a man about my age. The entranceway into her home was kind of dark since flowering shrubs grew all around. "Are you walking in the light?" were the words I uttered. I left, confused as to the reason those words came out when I was kind of making a joke with someone I had never met. 

That weekend, we had a prayer meeting instead of a worship service. But six weeks after I first arrived,

I was met with a request to open the doors of the church building. Coxim gets sweltering hot temperatures on a regular basis, and this was the middle of Brazilian summer. Every window was wide open to catch a bit of the breeze. And there, sitting with his mother, was the man I encountered two weeks before. 

"I had a vision the night before I visited my mother," he said after the service. "I heard strange words, 'Are you walking in the light?' and I saw someone like you at my mother's home. Distressed, I went there as soon as I could because I didn't want a foreigner coming to our family home." He went on to say, "I repented of my sins, which are many, and I want to see this church flourishing again."

Many such stories happened in the following three months. I spent much time visiting homes. Each Sunday evening, I barely made it to the bus station, usually as the bus was already backing away from the platform. And since it was a "pinga-pinga," letting men off as they went back for the Monday rounds on horseback, I usually arrived at our home in Campo Grande about 1:00 am. I left aside the petty differences that had coalesced into internal divisions. The beauty of the Lord Jesus Christ took over. 

Three months later, I led a baptism with 21 young people confessing their faith in the Coxim River. Two months after that, we witnessed a powerful moment with people confessing their bad feelings and bad words to each other. Seven months after I first visited, we had a graduate from the Seminary in Rio de Janeiro come to assume the pastorate. That service saw benches lined up outside the building, all the way to the street with over 300 in attendance. 

Reconciliation had taken place in an amazing way. The Spirit of the Lord had come upon us. Those humble believers, many with less than nine years of schooling, were willing to put away their differences. An "almost-failed" church came back to life in the most amazing way.

Oh! I don't dwell on flies and piranha fish when I remember Coxim these days. It's something else, something heavenly. "I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought." I Corinthians 1:10. 

A Family Reconciliation

Living anywhere in the world, one finds conflicts embedded in family relationships. This was true in Brazil, where we lived for many years. 

One of the families took us in with our weak Portuguese skills. The Monteiro extended family numbered in the hundreds, although I didn't know it when we first moved to Campo Grande in western Brazil. For the first year, I'm sure we gave them oodles of hilarious phrases, hundreds, probably, things they had never been taught about in school, but which were a more than serious attempt to murder the wonderful linguistic cadence inherited from Portugal.

Over the years, we had dozens, perhaps scores of pleasant encounters with various family members. I remember the day when I came home and told my wife, "Do you know that so and so is related to the person we had a meal with yesterday?" I was only beginning to understand the complexities of family extensions in South America. Oh, how much I had to learn! And how many mistakes I made!

Time passed and we moved to Brasilia. I received an invitation to be a speaker at a family gathering. To my surprise, 219 out of 263 persons in the extended family arrived for the five-day event over Carnaval. I spoke on family relationships in the book of Genesis: the first generation - "Abraham: How faith comes into a family"; the second generation - "Isaac and Esau: how conflicts come between brothers"; the third generation - "Jacob: how long-term patterns separate people"; and the fourth generation - "Joseph: how reconciliation brings relatives together." 

I did an exceptionally un-Brazilian thing the last morning of the retreat. It was still early morning when I asked people not to come to the front; instead, they would stand and make a prayer request, and people around that person would pray in a low voice while we sang choruses. I expected this to take about 15 minutes. Then the next person would make a request for prayer. 

I looked up at the end of the first chorus, opening my eyes, and there were several people standing at the front of the massive lean-to that had been built on the ranch/farm for the event.

What followed was amazing. For several hours, the Holy Spirit fell upon that wonderful extended family. Broken marriages were healed, distant relatives brought together, commitments made to live in harmony, fathers reconciled to their children, and children repented of wrong-doing. I didn't know any of the family secrets. Thank God, I didn't need to know. It was the third time I witnessed such a blowing away of the cob-webs from the dark places of the soul. Those people did not quench the Holy Spirit. 

Oh, how I came to love those dear people! The family made a commitment to go back to the fifth generation, 957 persons, and it was discovered that with the sixth generation, a total of 5,005 persons were descended or married into that family! Each of twelve children of the fourth generation gave enough through the donation of cattle each month over the course of a year to provide for a "family missionary" to travel throughout Central Brazil, locating each of those persons and bringing the message of God's grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, healthy relationships, and light in the face of Jesus Christ. Having been reconciled, they simply could not stop telling the good news of Christ's grace.

Thirty-four years later, I'm sure the family is well into the eighth generation of this family. Originally, the first man and wife came from elsewhere in Brazil. And now, they are scattered, usually because of work opportunities. Yes, I continue to hear precious things from family members through social media. Churches continue to multiply in Campo Grande one of the largest patterns of church growth I've ever heard of. May the name of the Lord be praised and uplifted for what those dear, humble people did in letting the Holy Spirit do his everlasting work.