Sing with grace in your hearts to the Lord

This past month we received copies of the new Spanish hymnal, Himnario Luterano, the new hymnal intended to become the standard worship resource for 18 Spanish-speaking countries. It was published by the Lutheran Heritage Foundation as a joint project with Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod World Missions, the Confessional Lutheran Education Foundation, and national confessional Lutheran churches in Chile, Argentina and Paraguay. The book is a comprehensive collection of prayers, Scripture readings and 670 hymns. There is even one in Guarani, the second official language of Paraguay after Spanish. 

Eduardo Flores, president of the national church.

Guarani is spoken by about 4.6 million people in Paraguay and there are also small communities of Guarani speakers in Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina. Guarani belongs to Tupi-Guarani, an ancient, indigenous language family that gave the English language loanwords like cougar, jaguar and toucan. However, about half of the hymns are carried over from hymnbooks that we already have, “Culto Cristiano” (first published by Concordia Publishing House in 1964) and “Cantad al Señor” (published by Concordia Publishing House in 1991). But these are not the only sources of hymnody for Himnario Luterano. 

During the Middle Ages, music in worship generally was the preserve of professionals. The priest would have chanted the Mass, and in larger parishes and cathedrals a choir might have sung the principal parts. In their monasteries and convents, monks and nuns marked the hours of prayer by chanting services of great complexity. The Reformation restored congregational singing to its rightful place in Christian worship, as was established in the New Testament (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16). Certainly the invention of the moveable-type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455 made it possible to place Bibles, copies of the Small Catechism and hymnbooks in homes as well as the pews of local congregations. It is the goal of the Himnario Luterano project to replicate this triad of Lutheran piety – Bible, catechism and hymnal – throughout Latin America.

Sergio Fritzler.

According to the Rev. Dr. Sergio Fritzler, director of Concordia El Reformador Seminary in the Dominican Republic, Spanish hymnody could be said to begin with Marcus Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, a poet who lived in northern Spain from 348 to 413 A.D. One of his compositions, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”, is known throughout the world, and a modern Spanish translation is included in Himnario Luterano. Jesuit and Augustinian missionaries to the New World organized choirs and orchestras among indigenous peoples. But the Spanish Inquisition, active not only in Spain, but also in the Spanish colonies from the 16th through the19th centuries, prohibited the publication and distribution of Bible translation and devotional literature not approved by the Roman Catholic church. As political pressure for religious toleration increased in Spain, William Harris Rule, a Methodist missionary from Great Britain, published a Spanish hymnal in Cadiz, Spain, in 1835. Three hymns from this hymnal are included in Himnario Luterano. José Joaquín de Mora (1783-1864), wrote Spanish hymns anonymously for fear of persecution. In Himnario Luterano there is an original hymn and two translations by José de Mora. Other early 19th Century Spanish hymnwriters whose work is included in Himnario Luterano are Tomás J. González Carvajal (1753–1834) and Mateo Cosidó Anglés (1825-1870).

Blessing the hymnals.

After Spain officially adopted a policy of religious liberty in 1868,  Federico (Friedrich) Fliedner was sent there as a Protestan missionary. Fliedner was the son of Theodore Fliedner, a Lutheran pastor who founded the first modern school for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth-on-the-Rhine in 1836.He founded a seminary, an orphanage, ten primary schools in Madrid and the provinces, and a bookstore. He also published a hymnal and there are 29 of his hymn translations in Himnario Luterano. 

Himnario Evangélico Luterano, the first confessional Lutheran hymnal for Latin America, was published in Argentina in 1927. From 1927 until the final edition of Culto Cristiano in 1995, a total of 16 confessional Lutheran hymnals were published in Spanish. All of these are sources for the hymnody in Himnario Luterano.

The new Spanish hymnal also includes many contributions by contemporary Lutheran authors (in alphabetical order): Adrián Correnti (Argentina), Germán Falcioni (Argentina), Daniel Feld (Brazi), Artur Feld Jr. (Brazil), Alceu Figur (Brazilian in Paraguay), Sergio Fritzler (Argentina), Guillermo Herigert (Argentina), Héctor Hoppe (Argentinian in the United States), Gregory Klotz (United States), Alejandro López (Chilean in Panama), Daniel Pfaffenzeller (Argentina), Cristian Rautenberg (Argentina), Antonio Schimpf (Argentina), Lilian Rosin (Paraguay), Danila Stürtz (Argentinian in Paraguay), Gerardo Wagner (Argentinian in Paraguay), Roberto Weber (Argentina), and Valdo Weber (Brazil).

According to our national church’s II Congress of Lutheran Educators in 2007, “Liturgical hymnbooks doctrinally classify hymns and categorize them in a musical, poetic way according to the ease of singing them. These selected songs make up a useful tool to make possible the liturgy according to the doctrinal philosophy of the church.”

Assisting Pastor Mendoza with the liturgy.

Law and Gospel in Barquisimeto

Luz Maria with Nancy Mora and Anny Duran.

On July 20, Luz Maria and I traveled to Barquisimeto for a deaconess training seminar for four women from Caracas and Maracay. Recognized as Venezuela’s fourth-largest city by population and area after Caracas, Maracaibo and Valencia, Barquisimeto is the capital of the state of Lara and an important urban, industrial, commercial and transportation center. It is also the location of “Cristo es Amor” (“Christ is Love”) Lutheran church and the new headquarters of the Juan de Frias Theological Institute. Ángel Eliezer Mendoza is the pastor of Cristo es Amor and director of the Juan de Frias Institute. 

Cristo es Amor was one of the first congregations that I visited on a tour of Venezuela in April 2003, some years after it was planted by Pastor James Tino, now executive director of Global Lutheran Outreach, but then an LCMS missionary to Venezuela.

Zugeimer Aranguren and her family.

 There I met Nancy Mora and her daughter, Anny. Mother and daughter both graduated last from the deaconess program sponsored by the Juan de Frias Institute and Concordia El Reformador Seminary and have bee installed as deaconesses at Cristo es Amor. The same is true of Zugeimer Aranguren, who met several times over the years. Zugeimer is not only a deaconess at Cristo es Amor, but also treasurer of our national church and administrator of a fund to help deaconesses with their work throughout Venezuela. I last preached at Cristo es Amor for the congregation’s 15th anniversary in 2009, when it was meeting in the lobby of a public building rented on Sundays (the congregation has experienced many ups and downs). 

Deaconess students and instructors.

This time I preached at vespers on Friday and Saturday and helped Pastor Mendoza with the divine liturgy on Sunday, July 23. Since July 22, was day of commemoration for Mary Magdalene, it worked well to speak of faithful women of the Old Testament on Friday and faithful women of the New Testament on Saturday. Edgar Coronado, pastor of La Fortaleza (“Fortress”) Lutheran Church in Maracay, preached the Sunday sermon. The theme of the seminar was C.F.W. Walther’s theses on “The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel” as applied to diaconal ministry. Pastor Mendoza led some of the sessions and Luz Maria taught the ladies in others. The students were Teresa Leombruni and Carolina Maldonado of “La Paz” Lutheran Church, Caracas; and Belkys Castellanos and Maria de Coronado of La Fortaleza, Maracay. The objective of the course was to help the students rightly divide Law and Gospel and determine the correct use of both in teaching classes and in personal visits. They analyzed hypothetical cases in light of cultural realities and the Word of God.

 

Maria Gabriela Rosales.

The fruits of Christian education

Luz Maria and I started Epiphany Lutheran Mission in La Caramuca with an emphasis on Christian education. We wanted to provide not only basic skills and character formation for stable, productive families, but also the motivation for doing so, by proclaiming the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. At least some of the young people we reached became the first in their families to finish high school, and even more important, were baptized and received first communion as members of our mission congregation. This year three of our young people completed sixth grade and will begin their studies in the liceo, which is equivalent to high school in the United States, this fall. Lorena Rujano and Yulmelvis Sala received first communion and Eduardo Garrido was baptized in our mission. Also, Maria Gabriela Rosales, who was baptized at our mission in 2015, received her high school diploma. We pray that she and Eduardo may yet be brought to the Lord’s table.

Eduardo Garrido.

Please continue to pray for these and other young people here. This July marks the surprising success of “Sound of Freedom”, a movie that deals with the frightening reality human trafficking as a global growth industry with tentacles that reach into our small town in western Venezuela. The film dramatizes the rescue of 55 children from a sex trafficking operation in Colombia in 2014. Last September Luz Maria and I participated in an online conference hosted by LeadaChild, one of our sponsoring mission agencies in the United States, and 5 Stones, a Wisconsin-based organization dedicated to raising awareness of child sex trafficking within the USA and elsewhere. We learned that young people can be lured/groomed for sex trafficking by job offers, expensive clothes, jewelry, vacations, restaurants, and anything outside their normal activities. This is consistent with the reported opening scene of “Sound of Freedom” in which two children are lured into a supposed movie audition by a glamorous woman who was a former Colombian beauty queen. But what makes grooming much easier these days is access to the Internet.  

Yulmelvis Sala and Lorena Rujano.

I recorded a special video message on this topic and publshed it on the mission's Spotify podcast (which normally consists of my Sunday sermons in Spanish) and on our YouTube channel. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have supported our mission, especially those who have been our partners from the beginning. We ask that you continue to pray for our young people here and around the world. May the Lord bless and keep you. Amen.

More news from the chicken coop

We built another section onto our chicken coop to accommodate 20 hens and their chicks. Our egg production has nearly reached the point where we may start regular sales of eggs. The chicken coop not only has been expanded, but greatly fortified to provide the chickens with more protection from predators, which include hawks, oppossum and snakes.