Desperate Venezuelans keep walking

Perhaps you have heard of the Pan-American Highway, which stretches from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina, on the southernmost tip of South America. Except, that is, for the 106 kilometers (66 miles) between Yaviza, Panama, and Turbo, Colombia. This is the notorious Tapón del Darien, or Darien Gap. No engineer yet has figured out a cost-effective way of building a paved road through this rugged, rainy region of marshland and mountains. Adventure travelers on the ultimate American road trip can have their vehicles transported from Panama to Colombia by water ferry. But for desperate people migrating north on foot, the Darien Gap is dense and dangerous.

So this year, 76 Venezuelans have disappeared while trying to cross the Darien Gap and some have been found dead. These stories and similar accounts of the perils of Venezuelan migrants dominate our local news, in between success stories of Venezuelans who have become NASA engineers, Major League Baseball players, and classical music composers and conductors.

Because the reality is, although political and economic conditions have stabilized somewhat, economic recovery will take years and people continue to leave Venezuela to escape violence, insecurity and threats as well as lack of food, medicine and essential services. Even with a recent increase in the minimum wage, mainly for government employees and pensioners, most Venezuelans still do not reach the figure of $1.90 a day set by the World Bank to consider the way out of extreme poverty. According to one survey, four in 10 Venezuelans say they would like to leave the country.

Good news from Global Lutheran Outreach

Although food and medicines are available through various outlets, most Venezuelans still have to decide each month whether to buy food for their families or needed medical treatment. So we were glad to hear that after a year of hiatus, Global Lutheran Outreach (GLO) has resumed its Venezuela Relief project. The resources are available to resume this work of mercy for at least one more operation, although is no guarantee for the future.

During the initial years (2017-2020), the project was a virtual lifeline because medicine ceased to be available in Venezuela. Today, medicine is once again available but at high prices and in dollars! Here’s how the program works:

1. Requests for medicine are coordinated through the Lutheran congregations in Venezuela.

2. Recipients can choose from a list of 18 common medications (up to three medications per patient). Additionally, volunteers in Santiago, Chile, send a supply of seven common medications to each church for them to distribute locally. All medicines are available in Chile without a prescription.

3. With your donations, medicines are purchased in Chile with the cooperation of a local pharmacy.

4. Volunteers at the Santiago mission congregation collate the orders and prepare each congregation’s shipment. Medicine is shipped using a globally-known shipping company, and then is unpacked and sorted for distribution to the beneficiaries.

Pray for Luz Maria’s mother

God willing, Carmen Rivero de Henriquez will celebrate her 92nd birthday on September 21. However, she is in increasingly frail health and cannot live alone. An assisted living unit, such as the one where my mother has lived since my sister’s death in February, is out of the question. Most of Luz Maria’s siblings still live nearby and have been taking turns caring for Carmen, including Luz Maria’s sister, Rosaura, who is a registered nurse. While Carmen was staying with us on the last weekend in August, she awoke at 4 a.m. and fell while trying to get dressed. She was taken by ambulance to a clinic and diagnosed with a double-fractured hip. There is a good chance of recovery, but will be completely confined to her bed for the foreseeable future. This will mean more frequent trips into town for us, but thanks be to God, COVID-19 restrictions have been relaxed and gasoline rationing has ceased.

First new deaconesses consecrated

In July we attended the graduation of 35 women that Luz Maria had mentored through the new deaconess program sponsored by the Juan de Frias Theological Institute and Concordia El Reformador Seminary in the Dominican Republic. On August 13, 2022, Angela Puzzar was consecrated and installed as deaconess at “La Fortaleza” Lutheran Church in Maracay, state of Aragua, by Pastor Edgar Coronado. On August 28, 2022, Migdalia Rodriguez was consecrated as deaconess at “Cristo Rey de Gloria” Lutheran Mission in Maturin, state of Monagas.

Reflection on the diaspora

On September 1, 2022, the United Nations reported that the number of Venezuelans that have fled Venezuela at 6.8 million, more than the 6.6 million Syrians that have fled Syria’s civil war and matching the 6.8 million Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion. This movement of Venezuelans out of Venezuela has been called “the Venezuelan exodus” or “the Venezuelan diaspora”. Both words can be traced to the Holy Scriptures.

Obviously, there is an entire book of the Old Testament about the first Exodus. The word, diaspora, derived from the Greek διασπορά, nowadays broadly refers to the mass dispersion of groups of people from their historic homelands. Many today may think of the flight of Jews from Germany in the face of Nazi persecution, but that was not even the first Jewish diaspora. The word was first used in reference to the dispersion of the Hebrews, their language and Scriptures, throughout the Mediterranean world beginning with the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel around 740 B.C. and continuing Babylonian conquest of Judah in 584 B.C.

Diaspora appears in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, first in Deuteronomy 28:25 as a warning of what will happen to the people of Israel if they disobey the laws of the covenant. In other passages, forms of the word generally refer to the “dispersion of the Jews among the Gentiles” or “the Jews as thus scattered”.

In the New Testament, the word, diaspora, appears in John 7:35 in the context of the Pharisees misunderstanding the words of Jesus about His return to the Father to mean that He would go out to the Jews dispersed among the gentiles and seek disciples from among them and also the Greeks. That is not what Jesus did, but it is what His apostles did. In James 1:1 and 1 Peter 1:1, the apostle address the new Israel, the church, in its diaspora.

The importance of this can be seen in Acts 8, following the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr, in Chapter 7. “And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”

It is in the context of persecution, suffering and flight that the church spread from Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and ultimately to the far corners of the Roman Empire (and farther, if tradition about the Apostle Thomas traveling to India is true). Many times in the last 2,000 years, God has used wars, disasters and persecution that drive people from their homelands to further the Great Commission of baptizing and making disciples of all nations.

This is evident in the case of the Lutheran Church of Venezuela, planted by North American missionaries in the 1950s. The GLO Venezuela Relief project depends on Venezuelan immigrants in Chile. Venezuelan immigrants also are being served the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod Mission in Lima, Peru, and by the synod’s partner church in Bolivia, the Christian Evangelical Lutheran Church of Bolivia. We have Venezuelans as missionary pastors in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Chile. German Novelli Oliveros, formerly associated with the Lutheran Church of Venezuela, now serves in the United States as president of the Hispanic Missionary League and pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, Milwaukee. Alfonso Prada, formerly the pastor of El Salvador Lutheran Church in Caracas, now is the pastor of St. Martini Lutheran Church in Milwaukee. (I was a member of Grace Lutheran Church of Oak Creek, on the far southern edge of the Milwaukee metro area from 1986 to 1995, and my great-great-grandparents settled north of Milwaukee, near what is now Concordia University Wisconsin, in the 1840s.) So, although times are hard for Lutherans in Venezuela, the Lord has used this crisis to further the proclamation of His Gospel among Latin Americans.

Oh God, who would have Your church testify of You among all the nations: Grant to the faithful, amid the trials of this present age, courage to confess Your name. Enable us by Your Holy Spirit to be among all those whose who serve You, that the hearts of men may be changed, the weak strengthened, those who sorrow be comforted, and peace proclaimed to the abandoned and afflicted. In the name of Your Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.

When the border is your back door

“Closing the back door” was a phrase that I often heard at conferences and seminars when I served on my local congregation’s board of evangelism in the 1980s. “Increasing numerical membership growth” was a topic that usually was filed under “evangelism and outreach”. Whether gaining more members for your congregation is necessarily the same as proclaiming the good news of salvation in Christ is a whole other topic, which I do not intend to get into now.

Luz Maria bids farewell to her grandson, Pedro.

But everyone can agree that bringing more people into the church (God’s sheepfold) is an important missionary objective, although not the only one. So, the point was, you might be bringing lots of people into the church through the “front door” (baptisms, confirmations, transfers of membership), only to be experiencing net loss of members through the “back door”: People slowly drifting away from the church. Evangelism, therefore, meant not only presenting the Gospel to the unchurched, but also discipling and involving new members in the life of the church as quickly as possible.

Now, in a North American setting, one of the factors that may contribute to backdoor losses is people moving away to another city or state. But none of those discussions of 30 years ago dealt with the situation that our mission faces now. And not just our mission, but other congregations in the Lutheran Church of Venezuela and other church-bodies as well. This situation is the sudden, snowballing mass emigration of people from the country. Imagine people who have been active and enthusiastic members of your congregation suddenly deciding that they can’t take it anymore and moving themselves and their families abroad.

Here the border is almost in our backyard, if not at the back door. La Caramuca is a town of about 5,000 people just outside of Barinas, a city of several hundred thousand. Only two or three years ago, we could catch a bus into Barinas at a corner less than a block from the mission. Now we have to walk across La Caramuca to the highway to catch a bus. The highway is national Highway 5, which you can take from Barinas all the way to Valencia. Then at Valencia you can hop on the four-lane freeway to Caracas. It’s a journey of seven to eight hours by car or bus.

But rather more people these days are interested in traveling the opposite direction on Highway 5. From Barinas, it’s about four or five hours to San Cristobal, the last major city before you reach the Colombian border. Highway 5 long has been a pipeline for the smuggling drugs, firearms and other contraband to secret airstrips and ports on the Venezuelan coast.

I visited San Cristobal once when I fell asleep on the bus back from Caracas and did not wake up when it stopped in Barinas. That was in 2007, and even then, the U.S. State Department has a standing waring against U.S. citizens traveling that close to the border, because of all the fun and games with paramilitary groups/drug traffickers in the borderlands.

Just on the other side of the border is the city of Cúcuta, Colombia. Thousands cross the border every day at Cúchuta, often on foot. Venezuelans fill the streets of Cúcuta. From Cúcuta, they may be able to find overland passage to Ecuador or Peru (few can afford to fly out of Venezuela).

Sharing soup after Divine Service.

Most of the people leaving Venezuela are young enough to hope for careers and families in their future, and able-bodied enough to work and try to send money back to relatives who are not so fortunate. Those left behind are the very old and the very young; parents in many cases have left their small children in the care of grandparents. These, of course, are people especially vulnerable to the shortages of food and medicine. We are ṕleased to work with Global Lutheran Outreach to meet these needs within the parameters that have been set for us.

Above all, we continue to offer a message of hope in the midst of a national crisis. Preaching, or public proclamation of the Gospel, must be by “whether in season or out of season”, according to the English Standard Version translation of 2 Timothy 4:2. Whether the current situation is an opportune time or not may be a matter of perspective. In the midst of great instability, people may be the most ready to receive the good news of the Lord’s continued presence, now and forever, in the lives of those who believe and have been baptized. Nevertheless, whether opportune or not, the public proclamation of the Gospel must continue. To combine Word and sacrament ministry with works of mercy and compassion has a long history among us.

We continue also to pray for the Venezuelans in exile; that they may find the better life they seek, but also may be fed with the Word and sacraments. Thanks be to God for Lutheran mission work in Ecuador and Peru.

“Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established. The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble. Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord; be assured, he will not go unpunished. By steadfast love and faithfulness iniquity is atoned for, and by the fear of the Lord one turns away from evil. When a man's ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him. Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice.” Proverbs 16:3-8

Praying for the Venezuelan diaspora

Leavetaking is common in Venezuela.

“Diaspora” is derived from Διασπορᾷ, a Greek word that means “dispersion” or “scattering”. It literally means “to seed apart” (dia, apart, plus speiren, to seed). Nowadays, in English and other languages, diaspora means the flight of a religious or ethnic group from their homeland because of a catastrophic event,  and the dispersion of their language and culture.

There have been many diasporas throughout human history. For instance, the mass emigration of the Irish during the great potato famine of 1845 to 1849. My own ancestors (those that spoke German) were among the “altluteraner”, the Old Lutherans, who fled religious persecution in the Kingdom of Prussia in the early 1800s. Some of them emigrated to the United States, others to Australia.

Many people today understand Diaspora with a capital “D” to mean the forced flight of the Jews from the Holy Land after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 A.D. But that was not, in fact, the first Jewish diaspora. The Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar II also destroyed Jerusalem and the first Temple, built by Solomon, in 586 BC. Later the Persian Emperor Cyrus allowed the Jewish people to return to their homeland and rebuild the city and the temple. But many Jews did return, and, during the 300 to 400 years before Jesus was born, thriving Jewish communities grew in nearly every part of the ancient Mediterranean world. This also meant that many parts of the pagan world gained familiarity with the Jewish language, culture and religion.

By the early first century, “the diaspora” had come to mean the entire community of Jews living outside of the Holy Land. The word is used in this way in John 7:35. The dispersion of Jewish Christians from Jerusalem in the face of persecution (but before the destruction of the city) is described as “the diaspora” in James 1:1 and 1 Peter 1:1

It was the diaspora of both Jews and Jewish Christians that provided the seedbed in which the early church grew beyond the boundaries of Jerusalem and of Jewish culture. Paul, who was known as, and called himself, “the apostle to the Gentiles”, on his missionary journeys always first seek out a synagogue in the cities that he visited.

Likewise, in Venezuela, Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod work begin in the early 1950s primarily in response to a call from Germans who had migrated to Venezuela in the aftermath of World War II. This led in time to the development of a predominantly Spanish-speaking Lutheran Church of Venezuela.

Which brings me to the topic of the “Venezuelan diaspora”. While the flight of Syrians from their country’s civil war has been called the century’s first great refugee crisis, some analysts estimate the exodus of Venezuelans from Venezuela may surpass it.

"The next refugee crisis is not being driven by a violent war but by a socioeconomic disaster of magnitudes hardly seen before," says Dany Bahar, a Brookings Institution economist. While United Nations data indicates there are currently 5.5 million Syrian refugees, about 4 million Venezuelans (over 10 percent of the population) and the number of Venezuelan refugees could surpass that of Syria.

“This is a humanitarian crisis,” Willington Munoz Sierra, regional director of the Scalabrini International Migration Network, a Catholic charity running a shelter in Cucuta, Colombia, told the Washington Post. In Cucuta and other border towns, desperate Venezuelans are live in parks and cheap motels or sleep on sidewalks.

As sad as this situation is, it is encouraging to hear that the dispersion of Venezuelan Lutherans may  open doors to mission and mercy work in surrounding countries. On May 6, we said farewell to Luz Maria’s daughter, Yepci, and her three children, Aaron, Oriana and Elias, as they left for Peru. Our prayers were answered as they arrived safely in Lima. LCMS missionaries and former members of La Fortaleza Lutheran Church in Maracay, Venezuela, came to their aid. They have both a place to live and a place to worship.

Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod involvement in Peru began in 1997, when the LCMS awarded a grant for flood relief and medical care. In August 2007, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck south of Lima killing more than 500 people, injuring more than 1,000 and destroying more 34,410 homes, according to news reports. LCMS missionaries traveled to Lima, Lucumo and Lunahuaná two weeks after the earthquake to evaluate how they could respond to the people in need. Missionaries handed out Bibles, food and personal hygiene products, and they got approval from the local government authorities to work there.

Lima is one of the largest cities in the Americas. Roughly 10 million people live there, which means that Lima contains one-third of Peru’s population. Mission sites in Lima include La Victoria, San Juan de Lurigancho, Chorillos. San Borja, and Los Olivos. Most of the Venezuelan expatriates attend the congregation in Los Olivos, says Cullen Duke, missionary pastor.

Pastor Adrian Ventura at my ordination in 2008.

 LCMS missionaries in Peru also prepare for the arrival and service of short-term teams, which perform many tasks, such as assisting with construction work in villages and teaching English in order to build relationships and share the Gospel. I was pleased to learn of the imminent arrival of such a team from Messiah Lutheran Church, Hays, Kansas, where I was a member from 1977 to 1980.

Venezuelan Lutherans also have found a new place to live and worship in Chile. On May 5, 2018, Adrian Ventura was installed May 5, 2018, in Constitución, Chile,as a church planting pastor. For more than 20 years, Adrian was pastor of Cristo Rey (Christ the King) Lutheran Church in Maturin, Venezuela, his native city. He twice served as president of the Lutheran Church of Venezuela. Pastor Adrian was the first Venezuelan pastor that I had the privilege to meet in 2002. Pastor Adrian shares responsibility with Omar Kinas, a pastor of the Confessional Lutheran Church of Chile for mission work in Concepción, Chile. Pastor Adrian is serving Venezuelan expatriates and others in his new call.

Sharing water.

Meanwhile, here in La Caramuca, we continue to attend the needs, spiritual and material, of those who remain in Venezuela. Since there is no public water system for the foreseeable future, we have been sharing the water from our well with our neighbors. We pray every Sunday as a congregation and every day in our homes for those Venezuelans who have left, and that God may grant us what we need to provide refuge, hope and assistance in this dark place.

Welcome and farewell

One month ago I said that by Rogate Sunday (the fifth Sunday after Easter, which was May 6 this year) we either would be continuing to pray for rain or giving thanks for having received spring rains to recharge our well. ]ndeed, praise be to God that it was the second possibility that came true.

Better yet, on that Sunday we baptized Emmanuel David Sanchez and received into communicant membership Genesis Marquina. Emmanuel David is the son of Eleno Sanchez and Luz Maria’s daughter, Sarai, making him her twelfth grandchild. His baptismal verse was Colosenses 2:12. *Having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.” Baptism is the visible means by which the Lord works regeneration in our hearts. Buried with Christ and dead to sin, we now, through the effective working of the word in Baptism, become partakers also of Christ’s resurrection: We are raised with Him by the same divine power by which God raised up Jesus from the dead. The casual comparison between circumcision and Baptism in this entire passage (Colossians 2:6-15) affords a very strong argument in favor of infant baptism; for the rite of circumcision, as practiced by the Jews, had to take place on the eighth day, and baptism is spoken of as being parallel to circumcision.

In fact, Genesis as one of the first to be baptized at our mission on June 29, 2008. Through baptism Genesis was adopted into God’s family, the church, by water and the Word, through a promise made good by the blood of Christ. Now she has entered fully into the communion of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament of the altar for the strengthening of the faith created in her at baptism. This is the continuing work of the Holy Spirit as I noted in the sermon. Her confirmation verse: John 10:27-28. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.” The Lord here gives us a guarantee against ourselves, against our own weakness and doubt. There are so many factors which tend to stifle faith in our hearts, to make us doubt the sincerity of God’s promises toward us, but this word of Christ must overcome all doubt most effectively.

So Rogate Sunday was a joyous day. But it also was a sad one, as we prayed that the Lord might protect them from material and spiritual danger, Luz Maria's daughter, Yepci Anahis Santana, and her children, Aaron, Oriana and Elias, in their travel to Peru. Like many Venezuelans, they will seek a brighter future in another country, Luz Maria's daughter, Wuendy Santana, has liived in Canada since 2010. Another daughter, Charli Rocio Santana Henrriquez, has lived in Ecuador for a little more than two years, as has Luz Maria's brother, Robert Henriquez Rivero. A niece, Romina Castillo, just left for Ecuador with her family, and another niece, Gabriela, now lives in Spain. So we prayed for them and the millions of other Venezuelans who have fled their homeland.

We ask that you, too, remember us and all Venezuelans in your prayers.