Managua, Nicaragua - A joint service of more than 2,100 Nicaraguan Christians and 50 visitors from the United States was also a joint milestone. While Nicaraguans celebrated 35 years of church of Christ involvement in their country, the Sunday service kicked off the 40th annual Pan American Lectureship.

The Nov. 2-8 conference, sponsored by the Minden, La., church, gave Nicaraguans the chance to show U.S. visitors how churches have grown in spite of isolation and political oppression.

In the past 10 years U.S. ministries have launched new mission efforts in Nicaragua, and the conference also gave missions supporters a chance to make progress checks and compare notes with fellow workers.

When the lectureship began in 1962, such involvement was rare, organizers said. Reuel Lemmons, long-time preacher and supporter of missions, designed the week-long tours to increase interest among churches of Christ for mission work in Central and South America, said Howard Norton, one of the event’s directors. As churches have launched missions, the lectureship has grown to include updates from the field.

Coordinators chose “It is the Lord’s Work,” a portion of I Cor. 3:6-7, for the lectureship’s theme because it emphasized that Nicaraguan churches have grown with little outside assistance.

“So much of the work in Nicaragua was done without help from Christians in the United States,” Norton said.

Missionaries from El Salvador first established churches of Christ in Nicaragua in the late 1960s. Interest among U.S. missionaries has increased since then, but the country’s strained political situation has made travel difficult.

A History of Intervention

The U.S.-supported Somoza government squandered the country’s resources and repressed its people until the late 1970s, said Dan Coker, a cultural anthropologist who trains church leaders at the Toluca, Mexico, church.

When the Sandinistas took power and made overtures toward communism in the 1980s, the Reagan administration cut off aid to the country and further damaged its fragile economy. The Sandinistas have since lost power, but their crumbling monuments to workers — some depicting soldiers with Russian-made machine guns in hand — remain, along with an unemployment rate greater than 50 percent.

Pablo Sanabria, a Nicaragua native baptized in 1975, took turns with his wife getting in line at 4:30 a.m. twice a week for modest portions of government-issued meat. Life was hard, but “the churches emptied themselves and let the spirit lead the way,” said Sanabria, who now works at the Baxter Institute, a Tegucigalpa, Honduras, church training facility.

“Things could not become worse in that time,” he said. “Nevertheless, the 1980s were the golden years for churches of Christ. Cooperation was exemplary. The school of preaching was operating at full capacity.

“How do we explain the fact that the church stayed alive? The church grows in the midst of   trials. Difficulties make the church stronger.

“Sometimes I think we need to pray for trials.”

Political hardships, coupled with earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters, have unified and grown churches in Nicaragua, he said.

“Isolation has taught the church to mature ... to look for ways to solve its needs,” he said. But isolation has “kept the church from enjoying many blessings — especially the material kind.”

U.S. Ministries Emerge

As the political situation has cooled, U.S. ministries have stepped in to help meet the material needs of suffering Nicaraguans. Baker coordinates work through Misión Para Cristo. The ministry provides medical help and material relief from churches in Jinotega, about three hours north of Managua, and San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Partnering with the Jose Delores school in Jinotega, the ministry provides clothes, shoes, school supplies and even vitamins for Nicaraguan students who can’t afford them.

Church members visited some of Misión Para Cristo’s ministries during the lectureship, including a prison ministry in the town of Matagalpa. Jon Steffins, assistant director of World Radio Gospel Broadcasts, West Monroe, La., drove a van of U.S. visitors to see the progress at the facility. The church in Jinotega sponsors the ministry, overseen by local worker Porfirio Molina.

Churches in Texas fund work programs at the prison that allow inmates to develop metalworking and sewing skills while they earn money.

Steffins translated as soft-spoken representatives of each cell block presented a list of needs for the facility. The prison is overcrowded, and many inmates must sleep on the floor.

While David Catalina, operations manager for relief ministry Healing Hands International, wrote down a list of the prisoners’ requests, Billy Albright knelt in the soil of a farm outside Managua, inspecting a breed of worm that was threatening a crop of beans.

Albright and John Curtis, of the Seventh and Beech church, Durant, Okla., inspected the first fruits of the farm, which will give poor church members a chance to grow their own produce and make money. The project is a partnership with several local congregations, including one in the Ducauli neighborhood in Managua.

The Seventh and Beech church oversees the work of Joe Romero and the Spanish World Bible School program. The program assists Managua churches in their goal of taking the Gospel to every home in the city. Church members plan to expand the mission to six other cities in Nicaragua beginning in 2004, Curtis said.

Durant church members coordinate with the Chisholm Trail church, Duncan, Okla. Church members Kent King and Ray Collins visited the farm and a piece of property a few miles away where church members plan to build an orphanage. The church members are part of Duncan-based Los Niños del Rey. The mission group provides material and medical relief for Nicaragua, occasionally paying for Nicaraguan children to come to the United States for life-saving surgery.

King and Collins have made several trips from Duncan to Nicaragua, but said they didn’t realize how many other church of Christ-sponsored ministries were involved in Nicaragua until they attended the lectureship.

Trials Ahead

Despite the outside assistance, local Christians face harsh economic realities and other hardships.

Pan American participants faced this reality as they learned that two children of church members were killed in an automobile accident shortly before the Sunday worship service. Pedro Batres, a church leader in Managua, consoled the families and delivered a collection from the lectureship. Batres later told church members that the family was overwhelmed by the sympathy of Christians who didn’t even know them personally.

The tragic deaths reminded church members of the struggles they must endure in a world where evil is ever-present, Batres said.

Leadership struggles in recent years have threatened churches in Nicaragua, and some preachers once supported with U.S. dollars have left the faith, Batres said. But he stressed that God can turn apparently bad situations to good.

Because of the hardships they’ve endured, church members in Nicaragua are perhaps more aware than Christians in other countries that God is responsible for church growth and the strengthening of faith, Batres said.

“We are just a servant doing the will of our  master,” he said. “The church is not our property.”

The 41st Pan American Lectureship is scheduled for Vitória, Brazil in early November, 2003. For more information, call (800) 533-7660 or see www.lectureship.org.