Cuba para Cristo - Cuba for Christ
Peter's Story
We were a team of six British people who spent five weeks in Cuba in summer 2000 with Cuba Para Cristo.
During our time there, we stayed with three different churches. The first place we went to is a small village called Pipiàn, about 65 km south-east of La Habana. The church there has been praying for 10-11 years that they would be able to build a pastoral house, believing that once they have one a pastor would follow. At the moment, their pastor is a guy who lives in Matanzas, about 40 km away, and is in charge of 5 churches and about 20 missions, so they see him maybe 5-10 times a year.
During the three weeks we spent with them, the house went from being a flat slab of concrete (the roof of the first story) to walls about 7 feet high; when they get the materials the roof will take another three weeks. We felt it was a massive privilege to be used by God as part of the answer to their prayers about this. In addition to building, we also helped with their summer kids Bible school (a couple of hours every weekday afternoon), preached in Bible studies, a youth service and Sunday evening services (NB being called upon to preach teaches you a lot about fervent prayer!), taught people a bit of English, and (the boys, at least) played a lot of football.
Just before we left, we had a proper match, Baptist church vs. rest of town, and then invited all the footballers along to a farewell, where we explained why we'd come and, together with the church, preached the gospel.
The other place where we spent a lot of time was Santa Fé, just outside La Habana, where God again graciously used us. The church there was running a 4-day Escuela Bíblica de Verano (Summer Bible School), with dates fixed long in advance and adults and kids classes planned, but no-one to take the kids class. Two weeks and a half before it started, Carlos went to check that the church there knew we were coming to stay with them, and discovered they didn't. God demonstrated His amazing timing by fixing it so that the time we spent in Santa Fé enabled us to prepare and run the kids class of the EBV.
We took the kids for three of the four days, doing drama, memory verses and painting. One of the members of the congregation told us that without us they would never have been able to do this; the six of us were halfway to outnumbering the adult congregation. In addition, we brought paper, paints and coloured pencils. The day off was due to a visit by some clowns and puppets from the church in La Habana which served as our "HQ". While we were in Santa Fé, half of us went to the church on one Sunday morning to do some work with the kids there as well. Catherine was translating for the three in Santa Fé, so as second best Spanish speaker, Peter was translator for the three in La Habana, which also taught him a bit about prayer!
The primary aim underlying the whole trip was to edify the Cuban church, so we were very glad to be told by one member of the church in Santa Fé that our trip was "not in vain", that we had brought "joy to the church and the community" and that we had "encouraged people in the church to get up and carry on". On another occasion, when Peter read to one our friends from Pipiàn the first part of Isaiah 60:10 "Foreigners will build your walls", he replied "No son extranjeros": "you aren't foreigners!"
Thanks to God, it appears our main aims were accomplished. One natural result of our time there was that we learnt a lot about Cuban society and the Cuban church. It was very encouraging to see the Cuban Christians faith in God to do impossible things (when the church in Pipiàn started praying about the pastoral house, there was no chance of getting permits to build it), their persistence in prayer, and the their great heart for evangelism. We met one guy who must be about seventy, but who is studying one day a month in a seminary in La Habana to go and work full-time at one of the four missions the church in Pipiàn has planted (and that church only has 41 members). We learnt of the great need for workers in the region: in Cuba, the Baptist church reckons it needs about a thousand new full- and part-time workers in the church in order to maintain the current level of work.
"Psalm 126:3" says "The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy."
Dios te bendiga,
Peter