There’s No Escaping

By Betsey Moe and Matt Beach

The CEDEPCA USA Board met last week in Guatemala. Revs. Betsey Moe and Matt Beach, two new board members, are today’s guest writers for the blog as they reflect back on the week of meetings and traveling to visit partners. Betsey was a PC(USA) Mission Co-Worker with CEDEPCA from 2020-2024 and now serves as the installed Solo Pastor at Community Presbyterian Church in Post Falls, Idaho. Matt is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California and recently served Heights Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas. Carrie Saathoff, co-chair of the Guatemala Partnership of New Castle Presbytery, has now rotated off of this Board after serving for six years, three as president.

As the English chatter from my flight from Spokane to Dallas blurred to the mostly Spanish chatter from Dallas to Guatemala City, I (Betsey) felt my body relax. In a few short hours I would be out of the country, unplugged, and free from the barrage of troubling news in the United States. I gave myself a preaching break for TWO Sundays, which meant that my mind could rest from the constant ruminating and wrestling. I’ll be honest: I was looking forward to the escape.

New and currently-serving board members gathered at the hotel on Sunday, and we enjoyed meeting and, in some cases, re-uniting, with one another. Our first full day was spent at the CEDEPCA office, worshipping together and hearing ministry overviews from staff members.

Arnoldo Aguilar, pastor and head of the Biblical and Theological Education program, preached on the relevance of John 14:2, in which Jesus says, “In my Father’s house are many rooms/dwelling places”—a passage often interpreted as a vision of heaven.

Arnoldo emphasized Jesus’ insistence that this vision be carried out NOW, that there is room in God’s household here on earth for all to find a home and to be included, and that we are called and equipped to carry out that vision in love. I had not escaped after all! Here I was, thinking about the scandal of radical inclusion and how hard of a message that is for people everywhere to enact.

Arnoldo later talked about the daily struggle of doing theological education in a country with so many obstacles, where the Bible has traditionally been used as a weapon to keep people living under the power of dominant groups. “We are called INTO this very challenging context to offer an alternative vision,” he explained.

With this reminder, I realized that I had not been needing an escape as much as encouragement to keep going in my own daunting context. The prophetic witness that is being required with a new sense of urgency in the U.S. is exactly what CEDEPCA has been doing for forty years in Central America. Each day following, we traveled to see CEDEPCA’s ministries spreading light and hope in communities. Matt will share with you a couple of the highlights:

Embodying the scandalous vision of radical hospitality, on Tuesday we sat down with the members of Luz de la Aurora Pentecostal Church in Guatemala City to read and reflect on the Bible in an intercultural context. Reading Luke 13:10-17, in which Jesus heals a crippled woman on the Sabbath, we came to recognize that liberation begins with seeing. The religious leaders of the day accuse Jesus of healing on the Sabbath, but Jesus accuses them of refusing to heal for eighteen long years! Had they bothered to see the woman in their context, they would have been compelled by the God of Life to set her free. Their refusal to see her was the very ailment that kept her bound and crippled for so long. By seeing the face of the other, not as anonymous outsider, but as a member of the Community of Life, healing and liberation come to fruition.

Then, on Wednesday, we visited the AJPU workshop in Totonicapan. It is here that three guys—Vicente, Alfredo and Geovany—with no more than the ingenuity of their minds and the creativity of their hands, make fuel-efficient stoves for indigenous households of Guatemala. Their motto is respira tranquila con tu estufa mejorada (“breathe easy with your energy efficient stove”). With the theme of radical inclusion in mind, they recognized a need in the community—seeing women bent over a traditional fire pit inhaling toxic fumes—and developed a solution that makes use of the tools and resources available in their own contexts. These stoves are such a blessing that women have begun asking if they can order them with custom paint in pink!

We also stopped at COPEARTE, a cooperative of women that has come together to make weavings, scarves, and purses to sell. Both AJPU and COPERTE received a Self Development of People grant from PC(USA)—think One Great Hour of Sharing—to purchase needed tools and equipment to boost their enterprises to the next level. CEDEPCA is the in-country partner for PC(USA) to identify qualified organizations, assist them in the grant application process, distribute the funds, and monitor progress.

CEDEPCA USA’s mission is to raise funds for and awareness of the life-changing work CEDEPCA is doing in Guatemala. We invite people from the U.S. to be a part of what God is doing to strengthen communities in Central America because we believe our well-being is bound up together. Together we can create the kind of world we want to live in—a world in which we honor and uphold God’s image in one another.