Brief reflections on a Cuban trip - Encouragement of the Cuban Church
If these are just some of the challenges (see first blog) - what are the encouragements? Well the first is the huge growth of the church in Cuba. Despite state monitoring of leaders, a huge lack of resources and the struggle to keep and pay pastors, the church of Christ continues to grow. When nothing else appears to work people are turning to Jesus in large numbers. There don’t appear to be non-evangelistic Christians - as many have seen their lives so transformed by the gospel of the Kingdom of God they naturally share their faith with others. In a society that is officially atheistic without totally freedom of worship, this is amazing and the British church has much to learn from it.
Secondly, although many have commented that in the current situation, especially with the break up of families, (with whole families unlikely to be able to leave Cuban shores together), the traditional Cuban joyfulness has disappeared - Christians still show an amazing gratitude to God, even in the midst of huge privations. Even when explaining their difficulties the Christians we met were thankful to God for his provision and his abundant grace.
Thirdly, and this is when the ministry of Cuba for Christ has had a great impact over the years, there is a desire for spiritual growth to be backed up by deeper biblical and theological education. Cuba still has a very well educated population (in fact in 2017 50,000 Cuban doctors working abroad brought $11billion into state coffers - greater than the value of the pre-Covid tourist industry) and the average Christian wants to grow in their knowledge and outworking of biblical teaching.
Over the years 1200 students have officially enrolled onto MOCLAM courses and 200 finished all eighteen courses - the equivalent to traditional lay readership training. Unofficially the figure is of over 2000 students and probably far more nearly all courses taught by Cuban believers. This has given leaders and lay folk across many denominations a solid biblical and theological grounding which would be the envy of the average UK church.
After much wrangling an interdenominational agreement was put together so that talented Seminary teachers have been able to come and study biblical languages at Tyndale House, with a native Spanish teacher. Ten students of Hebrew and half a dozen of Greek, came over on two separate visits to Cambridge. Unusually, friendships were made across denominations and rarer still they are teaching in different denominational seminaries which is enabling Cubans to offer quality postgraduate theological courses to pastors which include biblical languages.
We have Cuban teachers training Cuban pastors which has long term impact on their teaching, preaching and training of others. The first meeting we were involved in on our trip, was in a Bible college in Havana with a dozen highly qualified teachers who have deep relationships and are committed to serving the church inside and outside their own denominations.
I’d like to finish with a short story about a student Diego (not his real name). He is a 24 year old fourth-year student of classical music who has finished all 18 courses of Moclam and is teaching them to people in his local church. He recently visited a remote costal region of the isle where the majority of the local church are fishermen and farmers & when he asked how he might serve them was told that they needed Bible teaching more than anything else. Cuba for Christ is happy to give some money for Diego’s transport and provide materials for teaching.
One of the greatest early successes of the revolution was when university students went across Cuba to teach everyone how to read and write and apparently illiteracy virtually disappeared. Now a missionary disciple of the greatest revolutionary ever, Jesus Christ, is planning to use his holidays to sow Jesus’ ideas (and the whole council of God) to those on the edges of a country, that is in itself on the margins of western society - but right in the middle of God’s plans. Praise the Lord!
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