Deaconesses to gather in the Dominican Republic

English: Dominican Republic (orthographic projection). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Next week deaconess students from Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela will travel to the Dominican Republic for a three-day course on the letters of St. Paul. Deaconess Ginnatriz Mendoza will teach the course. She is the wife of Ángel Eliezer Mendoza, pastor of Nueva Vida (New Life) Lutheran mission in Yaritagua, the capital of the Peña Municipality of Venezuela's state of Yaracuy. She is a native of Argentina and trained as a deaconess at Concordia Seminary, Buenos Aires, Argentina, where her husband, a Venezuelan, recently graduated. They met while he was studying at the seminary.

Luz Maria and I also will travel to the Dominican Republic. Luz Maria trained as a deaconess by taking theological courses by extension and has worked with the Lutheran Church of Venezuela to train more deaconesses. 

Some may ask, what is a deaconess? One might also ask, what is a deacon? The two words have a ong history within the church. Both are derived from the Greek work, διάκονος (diakonos), which in a broad sense means "servant" or "one who runs an errand". The apostle Paul refers to himself as a "deacon" or servant of Jesus Christ in Colossians 1:23. However, the word also is used in the New Testament in a special sense to mean trusted laity in positions of responsibility. The first example of this is found in Acts, chapter six, where the Apostle delegated the oversight of the distribution of food to the widows to seven men "of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom."

Unlike the pastoral office of public preaching, teaching and administration of the sacraments, the office of "deacon" was not created by God's command. The apostles did not receive a divine order in a vision or a dream, but used their own judgement. This is similar to what happened in Exodus 18 when Moses, exhausted after trying to deal with all of the Israelites' problems himself, took the advice of his father-in-law and appointed "able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe" as his helpers.

Because the responsibilities of the "diaconate" or auxiliary offices are not fixed by divine mandate, they can change according to the needs of the local church. There is evidence within the New Testament that women as well as men were able to serve in auxiliary offices within the early church. The primary passage is Romans 16:1-2, in which St. Paul refers to a woman named Phoebe as a  "servant of the church at Cenchreae" The word translated "servant" is διάκονον, the feminine form of  διάκονος. 

Other women in the New Testament, while not specifically named as deaconesses, are described as devoting themselves to the service of the church. Outstanding examples are Lydia, a woman who who housed many Christians in her home; Priscilla, who with her husband, Aquila, helped Apollos to teach more accurately the way of God; and Dorcas who made clothes for the needy.

Some interpreters argue that the mention of "women" in 1 Timothy 3:8-13 means the wives of deacons. However, in verses 1-7, Paul speaks of the requirements to be a bishop (pastor) without mentioning their wives, ( only that a bishop must be the husband of only one wife). On the other hand, Paul makes a parallel list of requirements for deacons and "women". The word, γυναῖκας, "gunaikas" could mean a woman of any age or marital status, and thus could mean deaconesses. This was the interpretation of John Chrysostom (347-407), a great theologian of the early church.

An early reference to deaconesses outside the Holy Scriptures is found in a letter written to the Emperor Trajan by the Roman magistrate, Pliny the Younger, in the second century A.D.He mentions torturing two deaconesses to find out more about what Christians really believed.

The office of deaconess was formally recognized at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, and the Apostolic Constitutions, a Christian work of the fourth century mentions deaconess as an official position in the church. The work of the deaconess work in the post-apostolic church was to help the poor and sick; instruct catechumens; help in the baptism of women; and attend to the needs of woman in circumstances where a male deacon did not have access or could not be sent.

After the fifth century A.D., however, the office of deaconess was discontinued. As the church as an institution became more powerful within late Roman and early medieval society, it became more hierarchical in structure. The word "deacon" came to mean a rank within the clergy, not a lay office. Thus, deacons could not have female counterparts. The work performed by deaconesses did not disappear, but was taken over by orders of nuns. 

The modern revival of the office of deaconess began when Theodor Fliedner, a Lutheran pastor, and his wife, Friedericke Munster, opened the first modern Lutheran deaconess mother house in Kaiserwerth on the Rhine. Germany, in 1836. Fliedner saw a pressing need, demand for nurses with religious formation to attend the wounded as the Napoleonic Wars had created devastation and great misery.  By 1864, year of his death, some 1,600 women had received training as deaconesses in Kaiserswerth. One of them was Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse of the Crimean War.

In the village of Neuendettelsau, Bavaria, Wilhelm Loehe (1808-1872) also became interested in the restoration of the office of deaconess. He established a school for deaconesses in 1849, where women trained to care for the sick, teach school, and work in other fields of service to the church.

Rosie Adle with Luz Maria and Elsy Valladares
de Machado in 2007.

The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod began training deaconesses in 1919 and today both Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, and Concordia Theological Seminary, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, provide deaconess training program. 

Deaconess Rosie Adle, an instructor at the Fort Wayne seminary, worked in Venezuela to recruit and train deaconesses in 2007. She explained the role of the deaconess in a recent Issues Etc. interview.

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Autumn in Argentina

It should not surprise anyone that Luz Maria had a wonderful time in Buenos Aires. She really impressed with the city's many parks and plazas, the clean streets and the classical architecture.

The deaconess conference was held at a resort complex called Las Clavelinas. Argentina is a considerable distance south of the equator, so there are four seasons. But the order of the seasons is the reverse of that in North America. Due to the tilt of the Earth's axis, the months when daylight hours are longest in the Southern Hemisphere are opposite of the Northern Hemisphere.

Which is to say, it's autumn in Argentina right now. Luz Maria was enchanted by the changing colors of the trees, which you do not see in Venezuela. We are just a little north of the equator, so daylight hours vary only a little throughout the year. The sun rises and sets at nearly the same time all year round, so there is hardly any change in the seasons.

Luz Maria experienced a bit of culture shock in the area of social beverages. Coffee in Argentina was expensive and she find Argentine coffee to be rather weak (like North American coffee).

All coffee sold in Venezuela is espresso coffee, and the custom is to drink shots of coffee in tiny cups throughout the day. That is, except in the evening, when they serve "cafe con leche"
(coffee with milk) in large mugs.

On one of my first visits to Venezuela, another fellow gave me two bits of advice. First, I should consider marrying a Venezuelan woman, because they are the best in the world. Second, I
should get used to drinking at least four cups of coffee per day, the last one at 11 p.m. I took both of these suggestions to heart.

The hardest part about suggestion No. 2 has been getting used to coffee always being laced with sugar. Even if you ask for black coffee, they assume this means black coffee with sugar. Some place you can ask for "cafe guayoyo", which means a shot of espresso mixed with hot water and no sugar. Usually, in the coffee shops I ask for "cafe marron" (brown coffee), because this means coffee with a little milk and no sugar (although they do give you two sugar packets, in case you
want to add sugar).

At any rate, in Argentina, the social beverage really isn't coffee, but yerba mate. The yerba mate plant is a shrub related to holly, which is native to Argentina, southern Chile, eastern Paraguay, western Uruguay and southern Brazil. It also has been successfully cultivated in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

Here's the idea: You have a little pot (traditionally made from a gourd) in which you mash up the yerba leaves, maybe with other medicinal herbs. Then you pour regular tea over this mash and sip from the infusion through a metal straw (often silver or silver-plated). Actually, you do not do this alone, but rather pass the pot around so your friends can take sips from it.

Luz Maria found this custom as odd as a North American would and considered the sharing of a common pot unsanitary, but in Argentina it is considered rude if you do not take a sip.

The deaconesses had the opportunity to visit Concordia Seminary in Buenos Aires. This institution, founded in 1942, is small compared to say, Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, with only about 25 students in residence. However, the seminary also maintains a theological education by extension (distance learning) program which involves about 500 students.

Luz Maria made many new friends and since her return has received e-mails from places as far away as Uruguay and Guatemala. She received a gift for the two of us from Dr. Arthur Just, professor of exegetical theology and director of deaconess studies at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Although a native of Salem, Massachusetts, Dr. Just's family lived in Mexico and Spain for 12 years during his formative years, so he and Luz Maria were able to converse in Spanish. His gift was his book of devotions and prayers to use when visiting people in difficult circumstances, especially the gravely ill and dying. Dr. Just wrote an inscription in the book for Luz Maria in Spanish, but the book is in English, so I have been reading it more than Luz Maria has.

Seminar in First Timothy

Luz Maria also made the acquaintance of Pastor Roberto Bustamente, professor of New Testament studies and coordinator of the Buenos Aires seminary's theological education by extension program. He also is theological consultant for two series of children's books
published by Editorial Concordia, the Spanish-language division of Concordia Publishing House.

I met Roberto Bustamante myself the week after Luz Maria returned from Argentina. He was the instructor for a seminar on Paul's first epistle to Timothy, held in Caracas.

Pastor Bustamante had a supply of yerba leaves, but there were few people willing to share his yerba mate. I tried to explain to him about the casabe we had with our meals. Casabe is a flatbread made from cassava. Actually, it is made from a specific variety of cassava, which is found in eastern Venezuela, but not in the west.

Eastern Venezuelans love casabe, and since most of the people at the seminar were from the east, casabe was served almost every day. However, western Venezuelans have the same opinion of casabe as most North Americans: It tastes like cardboard.

A different type of cassava is used a potato substitute in western Venezuela. The whole tuber is either boiled or fried. McDonald's outlets in Venezuela often offer a choice of potato or cassava fries.

The plantain is another alternative to the potato. Plantains are like bananas, but not as sweet. In fact, they tast more like potatoes. Some people prefer fried plantain chips to potato chips.

The seminar was excellent. First Timothy is an important book of the New Testament, which deals with issues surrounding the church and the office of the public ministry. One of our
more interesting discussions concerned the identity and nature of the false teachers against whom St. Paul warns Timothy. There seems to have been two categories of false teachers
within the early church:

1. The "judaizers", or those who taught that Gentile Christians had to follow all of the ceremonial and dietary laws of the Old Testament in order to be saved (something like present-day Seventh-Day Adventists, of which we have plenty here in Venezuela):
2. Early Gnostics.

Both types may have been present in the church of Ephesus in Timothy's day and some passage suggest there may have been some affinities between the two. Thus, in the first chapter,
when Paul talks about the "fables and endless genealogies" that fascinate the false teachers, it could be a reference to the judaizers. Placing great importance on their Jewish background,
the judaizers would greatly concerned with pedigrees. In a similar passage in the epistle to Titus, Paul explicitly refers to "Jewish fables". But it might also apply to the Gnostics with their endless genealogies of spirit-beings and elaborate mythologies.

At least some of the false teachers may have had a foot in both the judaizer and Gnostic camps. This would be consistent with the idea that Gnosticism, or at least the variety of Gnosticism that the apostolic church had to deal with, originated during the Hellenistic era (roughly 323 to 146 B.C.) This was the time of the first great dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the Mediterranean world. The Gnosticism of the New Testament may have begun with attempts to synthesize Judaic theological speculation with religious ideas that were popular in the predominant Greek culture.

Mystical Judaism is still with us today in the form of groups like the Kabbalists (followers of the Kabbalah), who claim to have found hidden meaning in the writings of the Old Testament.
The Greek word, gnosis, means knowledge, and a common belief of the Gnostics was that the discovery of hidden knowledge or wisdom meant the liberation of the soul.

Another common belief of the Gnostics (for there were many different groups) was that the material world was inherently evil and that which was spiritual was inherently good. The human
soul belonged to the spirit world, so it was good, but it was imprisoned within the human body (which was bad).

This idea led the Gnostics in two different directions. One school of thought believed that the way to liberate oneself from the body was to practice a very ascetic lifestyle and abstain from all pleasures of the flesh, whether food or sex. Other Gnostics went completely the opposite way and said that, since the body was just a temporary shell eventually to be cast aside, one might indulge all one's appetites in whatever way one saw fit.

The more ascetic form of Gnosticism might have appealed to the legalistic Jewish convert to Christianity, while the Jewish ceremonial and dietary laws might have appealed to this sort of
Gnostic. There is historical evidence of at least, one Gnostic teacher, Cerinthus, who combined Gnostic and Judaism in just this way, insisting on complete obedience to the Old Testament law.
Cerinthus is believed to have been a contemporary of the Apostle John and, in fact, the Gospel of John may have been written to counter the teachings of Cerinthus.

Thus, in chapter four of 1 Timothy, when St. Paul warns against those who would forbid marriage and the consumption of certain foods, saying, "For every creature of God is good, and nothing
is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving," he again could be speaking to both judaizers and Gnostics. Finally, 1 Timothy 6:20 seems to point directly at the Gnostics:

"Oh, Timothy! Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge..."

The judaizers might have "forbid marriage" simply because they did not approve of marriage between Jews and Gentiles. However, all types of Gnostics, both the ascetics and the libertines, had a profound distaste for matrimony itself and for reproductive sex.

This is important to understand because there has been a resurgence of interest in Gnosticism by people wishing for a more "feminist" form of religion. It has become almost customary every Easter season for someone to promote one of the bogus"Gnostic gospels", such as the "Gospel of Judas" as an aalternative" interpretation of the life of Christ.

But the Gnostics were elitists, not egalitarians. Their Jesus was not the Savior of the world, Who came to redeem all who would believe, but a guru who revealed the secret knowledge to a select
few. Those who have this knowledge, whether male or female, are not bound by the petty rules that govern ordinary people, including the rules of gender. But that does not mean the Gnostics worshipped "the feminine principle" or were particularly interested in the rights of, say, single mothers.

Here is what the Gnostic "Gospel of Thomas" reveals about Gnostic attitudes:

"Simon Peter said to them, 'Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life.' Jesus said, 'I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' "

The Judaizers denied the Gospel by denying that Jesus fulfilled all the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament and through His life of perfect obedience to the Father, all of the Mosaic law.
So, in the new covenant in His blood, salvation comes by faith alone, not by works of the law.

But the Gnostics denied the Gospel in two ways:

1. By denying that all that God created is good and that evil entered the world only through man's disobedience;
2. And that there will be a bodily resurrection to eternal life for all who believe.

Fifteenth anniversary of Cristo es Amor

Following the seminar in Caracas, I did not immediately return to La Caramuca, but rather traveled to Barquisimeto with Pastor Miguelangel Perez. He serves as national missionary
to two congregations and two mission stations there.

Teresa Leonbruni, a member of one of the congregations, Cristo es Amor (Christ is Love) Lutheran Church, wanted to donate some musical instruments to Corpus Christi Lutheran
Church in Barinas and to La Caramuca Lutheran Mission. So I went to Barquisimeto to personally accept the donation and to preach at Cristo es Amor, May 17, 2009.

It also happened to be the Sunday on which Cristo es Amor celebrated the 15th anniversary as a congregation. When I first visited Cristo es Amor in 2003, the congregation was meeting in a large, beautiful church building and Sunday attendance usually was more than 80 people. Much has changed since then.

First, a former pastor left the Lutheran Church of Venezuela, taking a large part of the congregation with him. This led to a prolonged struggle in which the original congregation lost
all of its property.

Membership dropped to between 15 and 20 people. This remnant was able to find a tiny storefront in downtown Barquisimeto in which to meet on Sundays. The rent was exorbitant, but at least they had a location.

A longtime Sunday school teacher, Jesus Franco, stepped up to the plate and became pastor of Cristo es Amor in 2005. The congregation rallied behind him, only to be rocked by his sudden death in 2007. Since then Cristo es Amor has not had its own full-time pastor.

However, the congregation now rents the lobby of a government building for a much more reasonable rent. It provides them a lot more space, although the only public restrooms are up on the third floor. The congregation now has around 25 active members and Sunday attendance
is increasing.

They set up the altar in front of the main elevators. I halfway expected someone to arrive from "on high" during the service, but that did not happen.

Since it was Rogate Sunday, I preached on John 16:23-30. I reminded them that "rogate" was the Latin root for the Spanish word "rogar" or "to pray". Rogate Sunday is especially devoted to prayer because in most parts of the world, it falls during the time of year when spring rains are
due to begin. If there is anything that people in farming communities pray for desperately, it is spring rain. John 16:23-30 records the first time that our Lord gave His disciples permission to pray in His name. With this authorization came the promise that God will hear all prayers offered sincerely in the name of Jesus, but without Christ as our Mediator in heaven, there is no such assurance.

After the service I was presented with the musical instruments by Teresa Leonbruni's children, Omar and Genesis. They gave me a guitar for Corpus Christi and a cuatro (Venezuelan four-stringed guitar) for La Caramuca Lutheran Mission. Our mission now has three cuatros,
a six-stringed guitar and young people who want to learn to play these instruments. But we have to find a music teacher to instruct everyone in how to play them.

I was able to return that afternoon to lead worship in La Caramuca.

Mother's Day at the mission

The previous Sunday, May 10, in between Luz Maria's return from Argentina and my departure for Caracas, we observed Mother´s Day. Several of the mothers of the Sunday school children were in attendance. One mother was very interested in having her two children attend our new confirmation
class. We now have about six enrolled in the class, the problem is getting everyone to show up the same day at the same time.

The appointed Gospel for May 10 was John 16:5-15, but since it was Mother's Day, I also quoted in the sermon from the Jubilate Sunday text, John 16:16-22. Specifically, the part about the troubles and trials of this world between now and the Lord's Second Coming are like a woman's
labor pains. I reminded the children of how much trouble it is for a woman to carry a child for nine months, and asked to think of how their mothers went through that pain for their sakes. Why would anyone endure it except that the labor pains are scarcely remembered, but the joy of having a child lasts for years and years.

Also that Sunday, we delivered a "care package" from Corpus Christi Lutheran Church to the Torres family in La Caramuca. The items in the care package were gathered by children receiving supplemental tutoring in their public school studies from Luz Maria´s daughter, Charli, at Corpus Christi on weekday afternoons.

Leaving on a jet plane

Luz Maria left this week for Buenos Aires, Argentina, to attend the First Lutheran Deaconess Gathering in Latin America and the Caribbean. April 30 to May 4, 2009. The event will be hosted by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Argentina with support from Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod World Relief and Human Care, as well as LCMS World Missions. Pastor Matthew Harrison, executive director of LCMS World Relief and Human Care, will be the keynote speaker. The event also is expected to draw people from Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Guatemala, Panama and the Dominican Republic.

Elsy Valladares de Machado of Caracas will be Luz Maria's traveling companion. Together Luz Maria and Elsy are national coordinators of the Lutheran Church of Venezuela's deaconess program.

Clearly I did not marry just any Venezuelan. It is said the new model for overseas missions is for North Americans to work in partnership with national church leaders, a concept that we have taken to an extreme.

Nevertheless, there is a lot to be said for it. Over the last 50 years, the world has seen phenomenal growth in the number of Christians living in "the Global South" (Africa, Asia and Latin America) or "Majority World" and the emergence of national churches there.

Image via Wikipedia

The term "Majority World" has come to be used as a replacement for "Third World" or "developing world", and it has a double meaning. First, the majority of the world's human population now lives in Africa, Asia or Latin America. Second, so does the majority (75 percent) of the world's Christians.

According to Pennsylvania State University professor Philip Jenkins, author of an influential Atlantic magazine article, "The Next Christendom" (which he later developed into a bestselling book):

“Christians are facing a shrinking population in the liberal West and a growing majority of the traditional Rest (of the world). During the past half-century the critical centers of the Christian world have moved decisively to Africa, to Latin America, and to Asia. The balance will never shift back.”

Yet Christians in the United States still have the financial resources, educational institutions and, above all, the religious liberty, to train and send cross-cultural missionaries that many national churches do not. There are not that many places in the world where there is a happy combination of all three of these things.

Becoming a cross-cultural missionary means not only receiving a sound theological education, but also learning to live day-to-day in an environment where the language and customs are very different. But even with the amount of preparation involved, once a trained cross-cultural career missionary is in place,
it often is more economical to support such a person than to rely on short-term volunteer missionaries.

Dr. Douglas Rutt, a professor at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and a former missionary to Latin America, wrote in a 2008 paper "Global Mission Partnerships: Missiological Reflections After 10 Years Of Experience", that U.S. mission agencies should not simply fund projects for national churches but also provide the career missionaries who can train national church leaders in all aspects of the missionary endeavor.

According to Dr. Rutt, "What we have seen in our circles is that there is precious little preparation of a
missiological nature for those missionaries coming from the majority world. While typically they have a thorough theological education at a residential seminary, most have had almost no orientation in cross-cultural ministry, linguistics, mission strategy, mission history, and theology of missions...Too often we have made assumptions about the readiness of a family to live and work in another part of the world that have proved to be false because we assume the cultures are similar. For example, if you send a Brazilian family to work in a place like Panama, you may assume that, since they are Brazilian from Latin America, they will have to cross very little cultural and linguistic distance to minister effectively in Panama, another Latin American country. Our experience has been that in this kind of situation those Brazilians who go to a place like Panama run into the same kinds of misunderstandings in their new home, make the same kinds of inaccurate judgments about the new culture, go through the same culture shock, experience the same loneliness and isolation, often have similar linguistic challenges, and go through the same kinds of
trials and tribulations that are a part of becoming enculturated in a new society, just like any of our missionaries from the U.S."

Nevertheless, from 1988 to 2008, the number of "career missionaries" sent out by U.S. mission agencies declined by 45 percent. Ralph D. Winter, founder of the U.S. Center for World Missions, said in a 2007 speech to the Asian Society of Missiology in Bangkok. that nearly two million short-term volunteers leave the United States each year compared to 35,000 long-term missionaries. It costs at least five time more overall to send a short-term volunteer than a long-term missionary – financial support that Winter suggested would be better invested in a long-term missionary. (In 2005, Time magazine included Winter in a special feature section on "America's 25 Most Influential Evangelicals")

Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with short-term mission trips. These trips may yield long-term results if:

• Volunteers are moved to consider preparing for a career in the mission field themselves;
• Or, return home with a renewed zeal to support long-term missionaries.

However, it is a question of balance. Craig Greenfield wrote in the February 2009 issue of Lausanne World Pulse: "...the mission pendulum has swung heavily toward resourcing local people...supplemented by short-term missionaries who focus on transferring their skills without learning the language and culture. But we must strive to find balance by remembering the rich biblical tradition of prophetic outsiders...Throughout biblical and recent history, God has used outsiders to bring about his purposes in foreign nations".

Greenfield is the international coordinator of Servants to Asia's Urban Poor. For six years he and his wife, Nay, lived among the urban poor in the slums of Cambodia.

In regard to "empowering" national church leaders, Greenfield writes "The concept of empowering people is central to good mission work. But it takes wisdom to discern the difference between empowerment and
disengagement. Just as a good manager of people will know just how much to delegate and how much support to provide, so a foreign missionary needs to learn how to empower rather than overpower. However, not showing up at all is not empowerment; it is apathy".

In addition, according to Greenfield, "It is a beautiful and exciting thing to see African, Asian, and Latino missionaries spreading out across the globe, and there is much more that can be done to assist and support them. But when Jesus told us to go into all the world and make disciples, he wasn't letting any nation off the hook as though their contribution was not worthy or useful. We must come alongside our brothers and sisters from around the world and joyfully do our part in the Great Commission".

Luz Maria and I have this objective in our mission project: To use the strengths of our different backgounds to provide the Christian instruction sorely needed in this country, both at basic and advanced levels, and particularly for the region where we live. We thank God for the opportunity to serve and that we may continue the good work that has begun here in La Caramuca.

Spanish Portals of Prayer once more in print

Spanish translations of Portals of Prayer were at one time popular as devotional literature in Venezuela. Actually, they still are. But only used copies have been available since 2003, when Concordia Publishing
House stopped printing Portales de Oracion. Since 2007, someone at El Salvador Lutheran Church has been faithfully transcribing the used copies in which the dates correspond to the current year and e-mailing to everyone on the Lutheran Church of Venezuela mailing list. The drawbacks to this include the time required for transcription and the costs of printing and making multiple copies of the e-mails every month.

Now there is another alternative as CPH has resumed publishing Portales de Oracion. Even better news is that this time the daily devotions will be composed in Spanish rather than translated from English as was the practice in the past. Individual subscriptions will cost $10. Presumably there would be the cost and logistics of shipping Portales de Oracion to Venezuela, but it has been done before.