Category: Deaf

The reason I took the wild bus ride to Tampico was to take part in an exciting week at one of the other Deaf churches here in Mexico. This is a church that was started by an American missionary who is also Deaf himself. The church celebrated their 8th anniversary this week as well as ordained their new pastor. He took over as pastor during the week. The missionary will be with him a few more weeks and then will be leaving Mexico to visit his supporting churches and pray about where God would have him go next to start a new work.

I had a great time in Tampico. I met several people from First Coast Baptist Church, including the pastor. Pastor Edwards and family were missionaries to Kenya. I was able to grab an interview from him and his wife for Missionary Talks. There were also a few of their Deaf from church along with an interpreter and her husband. A couple of other special guests were there. One participant was Allen Snare. I did not know he was going to be there. Allen has been a good friend of mine since back when we both had much more hair, almost 20 years. Because of our ministries, we have never spent more than a week at a time together and we always spend a lot of time catching up on each other’s work.

During the week’s activities we had an opening service in which close to 50 attended. There was even one service early in the week where we had about 75 people. This church normally has 20 to 40 people in attendance on a regular basis.

The church was also celebrating their 8th anniversary. I was able to be at their 5th anniversary a few years back and have built a good relationship with the people.

The missionary, Jim Walterhouse, who started the church was pleased to have the building completed. It is not totally done, but it is very usable. The church people now have a building that they can work on to completion. While we were there we applied plaster and paint to some of the walls. I took part in some wiring and plumbing to help get ready for the weekend.

The final major activity of the week was the ordination of the new pastor. I was honored to be a part of Francisco’s ordination counsel. We were not able to go through the legal paperwork this week to officially organize the church. Otherwise, we would have also done a church vote and installation of Francisco as the pastor. As it is (and this is just a technicality) he is the pastor of the mission. Until it is officially a church, they will not vote on him as pastor.

I got to spend some time in downtown Tampico. In my many trips to the city (more than 10), I have never had the chance to roam around downtown. It was fun to hit the tourist market. I spent so much time interpreting for all the other visitors that I forgot to do any shopping of my own. I would have liked to pick up a few gifts for my kids. Our part of Mexico is so different from the rest that there are neat souvenir items that the kids would have enjoyed. I guess I will have to go back again.

The missionary there will be leaving the church completely to Pastor Francisco by the end of the year. I will still be back there on a regular basis though and keep up a good relationship with the church. I have only known Francisco since July, but we have built a friendship with one another personally. He is planning to spend a week with us and our ministry in the spring.

As a follow up to something I mentioned a month ago, our church is still seeing some exciting growth. When we started the church almost a year ago, we went into it with lots of momentum and enthusiasm. That quickly dried up as the momentum we were able to create came to a screeching halt while trying to find a building to meet in.

It seems that over the last month we have started to see that excitement and enthusiasm start to build once again.

Last Sunday we had a great crowd with a couple of visitors. There were 16 people there. If that was not a record up to that point for a regular Sunday service, it would have been close. Wednesday we had 25! that included 4 visitors. This morning we had some of our visitors from the previous services and 4 more! We had a total of 10 new visitors in the last 3 service days.

For a church that normally has 14 people on a Sunday, those are some exciting numbers.

Today our main activity at camp was to go to the old Mayan city of Mayapan. This was inhabited between the years 1200 and 1440 AD.

This was the first Mayan ruins that my wife and I had ever seen back in 2001. Today was amazing to see the difference. When we were here in 2001, they had just started doing a rebuild of the city. Though I don’t remember everything that was there back then, I do remember that there was much more growth on many of the structures. Also, there were many foundations for buildings with piles of rocks beside them.

Today it seemed like we did not walk in the jungle as much to see the place and there were many more structures. Where there were piles of rocks before, there were now buildings. In the piles of rocks previously, there were many rocks with numbers on them. That was to help when they finished repairing the inside of the structure, they would be able to place the outer rocks in the original place that they came from if they knew where they were before.

I think everyone had a great time at the ruins. Many of our church congregation has never been to this archaeological site. It is only about 45 minutes from town and is not overrun by tourists.

After the trip to the ruins, we went back to the campground and played there for the afternoon and had 2 great church services this evening. No rain today.