wfn.org | Cars and churches: Javier Naranjo builds them the same way

[PCUSA NEWS <PCUSA.NEWS@ecunet.org>]

Note #7128 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

16-April-2002
02145

Bit by bit

Cars and churches: Javier Naranjo builds them the same way

by Jerry L. Van Marter

PERICO, Cuba - Walking the "grounds" of Iglesia Presbiteriana en Perico, one can't help but notice the car parts strewn about.

The church property consists of a small house, a sanctuary, a ramshackle garage - and a junkyard. On a bed in the house rest a door panel and a generator. Just outside the back door of the sanctuary is a rusty bumper. On the dirt floor of the garage are three car doors and several boxes of parts.

To a clueless Norteamericano, it's a heap of automotive trash. 

But to the Rev. Javier Naranjo, the 75-year-old pastor, it's a support system for his pride and joy - a 1985 Lada.

"My car is with the mechanic," says Naranjo, of the Presbyterian Reformed Church in Cuba (IPRC). 
"It will be fixed soon."

One tries, and fails, to imagine what the Russian-made heap might look like; and one can only guess what Naranjo may mean by "soon."

"Here in Cuba is not like the U.S.," the pastor explains patiently. "To you it looks like a pile of parts, and you would be discouraged and frustrated. But here, when each new part is finished and put back together, it makes us happy. I am getting happier every day!"

He disappears for a moment and returns with a steel bar about six inches long. It's a part he made himself to fix the parking brake of his beloved Lada. "All I need now is to find a drill to make the holes," he says. He holds the new part in one hand, the original in the other - and indeed, except for the holes, it looks like a match.

Naranjo says he has always been good with his hands. American friends bring tools and gadgets for him when they visit. His eyes light up when he sees shiny new pliers, or a penlight, or roll of electrical tape - all unavailable in Cuba because of the U.S. embargo.

Naranjo was an active elder in the IPRC when Fidel Castro's revolution toppled the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on Jan. 1, 1959.

Over the next five years, 32 Presbyterian pastors - half of all the trained pastors on the island - fled. Javier's first wife left in 1963. But he stayed, and in 1967 enrolled in the Seminario Evangelico de Teologia (Evangelical Theological Seminary) in Matanzas.

Now "retired," he has returned to the small church in rural Perico where he began his ministry more than 30 years ago. In all the intervening years, through the seldom-thick and mostly-thin times of the revolution, one thing has not changed: Javier Naranjo knows how to grow churches.

He does it the same way he repairs his beloved Lada - one part at a time. 

"One new person is a great thing - we get happier and happier," he says. "We have to value what we have right now. We have so many people coming right now, but we still have to treat them like the one-at-a-time who used to come."

Naranjo returned to the Perico church to support his wife, Yolanda, a retired schoolteacher now pursuing what she calls "my first vocation." She is a student at the seminary, which was co-founded in 1946 by U.S. Presbyterians and Methodists, and she shares pastoral duties with her husband while commuting by train to Matanzas, about 30 miles away. Their 30-year-old daughter, Miriam, is also a student at the seminary.

When the Naranjos arrived a year ago, the Perico church had fallen on hard times. It had been without pastoral leadership for more than a decade. "We lost 10 or 11 years of people," Javier Naranjo says.

Now the Sunday School has grown from a handful of kids to more than 50 adults and children, and worship attendance has increased from less than 10 to more than 35. Services are held on Saturday nights - a tradition begun by visiting pastors who had to be in their own churches on Sunday.

The key to growing churches, Javier says, is meeting people - and needs - one at a time. 

When Javier Naranjo talks to people, the conversations inevitably turn to what Jesus Christ can do for them spiritually, and what the church will try to do for them materially.

The little Perico church is a beehive of activity: prayer meetings on Monday, Bible study on Wednesday, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on Thursdays and Sundays, worship on Saturday, Sunday school on Sunday. "Next time you visit, we'll have something on Tuesday and Friday," Javier Naranjo promises with a smile.

Wherever one travels in Cuba, hunger is a serious problem. The Perico church will soon launch a "meals on wheels" program for the elderly. "The pension is $4 a month (the average Cuban wage is $12 a month), which is not enough, so all our elderly people are hungry," Naranjo explains.

Although he is officially retired, he gives no thought to slowing down. Every Sunday afternoon he makes the 20-mile trip to San Jose, where he is revitalizing another small Presbyterian church. 

"In this vocation you never retire," he says. "I cannot sell my Bible like it was a set of tools. This calling from God is for your whole life."
The next steps, he says, "are up to God." Yolanda will finish seminary in a matter of months. She will probably assume the pastorate of the Perico church.

"We're just going with the Spirit," Naranjo says. "We're here because God opened this path up to us. We like to think we're making the decisions, but it's not true; God is making the decisions." 

More than 40 years into the Cuban revolution, Naranjo is determinedly focused on the future. "You can't just tell the old stories," he says. "You have to keep making new stories."

Glancing wistfully at his new piece of parking brake, he adds: "God's call is like a car. You can't drive around in reverse."
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