Mission offers more than memories, Building Costa Rican church changed lives
By Heather Hahn
Five years ago, the tiny Methodist congregation in Alajuela, Costa Rica, was worshipping in a rusty tin, one-room building beside a coffee field.
Today, because of the volunteer labor of Arkansas United Methodists, the Costa Rican worshippers can sing God’s praises in a two-story brick sanctuary and study Scripture in a separate, colorfully decorated Sunday School building.
Twenty-three Arkansans traveled to Costa Rica in early February to mark the completion of the bulk of their construction project with a dedication service.
They celebrated with a congregation that has expanded along with their facility — from fewer than 40 people in 2004 to now more than 120 regular worshippers, including several young families.
La Iglesia de la Restauracion (which means the Church of the Restoration) still has plenty of potential for further growth. That coffee field is now rapidly being overtaken by a bustling subdivision.
But even as the Arkansas mission volunteers helped enlarge the church, many say they found their own Christian faith enlarged as well.
“It’s like any mission trip,” said Kay Parda, a volunteer who has been involved in the building project from the beginning.
“Initially you are excited to go because you think you are going to make a huge difference because you can build something. … But that’s not really it. When you go, it’s personal. It’s a life-changing experience in so many ways spiritually.”
The project has even inspired one of the volunteers to change careers.
Rhonda Cooper, then cook and custodian at First United Methodist Church in Bryant, joined a team from the church on a mission trip in February 2008.
Cooper is a member of Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Benton, but she was eager to join the effort after hearing the excitement from First UMC members about their mission experience.
While in Costa Rica, Cooper did everything from mixing concrete to hauling blocks as she helped with the construction of the church’s bathrooms.
“It allowed me to see a side of myself that I’ve never seen before,” Cooper said. “Even though that wasn’t a huge impact on the world, I realized I had the ability to make a little bitty start.”
When she returned to Arkansas, she told Parda, who at the time was minister for missions and outreach at First UMC in Bryant, that she planned to leave her custodial work and pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a registered nurse.
She now is studying nursing at Ouachita Technical College in Malvern and will graduate as a licensed practical nurse in December.
“It was during that trip that I really felt like I had enough faith in God to believe that He would see me through it,” Cooper said. “He showed me that I could leave the United States and do something that was out of the box for me. He used that mission.”
If God is willing, she said, she hopes to one day serve on medical missions.
The building project began with a Volunteers in Mission training session in Little Rock in March 2004. Parda was among the 32 people who attended.
She said she could immediately sense the Holy Spirit at work among the group. Only a few hours after meeting her classmates, Parda knew she wanted to share a mission trip with them.
Don Weeks, the Arkansas conference’s minister of Volunteers in Mission, challenged the class to do just that and “get on-the-job training.”
He hoped that after serving on a mission team together, the classmates would return to their home churches and lead people from their congregations to join the endeavor. The class accepted Weeks’ challenge.
Most of the class already had participated in projects in Mexico and elsewhere in the United States.
To try something new, the class set its sights on Costa Rica.
In January 2005, the group embarked on its first exploratory trip to Costa Rica to scout out which projects the mission team could take on. After dropping by the Methodist Center in Alajuela, the group’s first stop was the tin building where La Iglesia de la Restauracion then worshiped.
“There were four gothic columns out there, and some concrete block work where someone had started construction,” Weeks recalled. “One of the things we talked about is that this is a good example of a mission team that probably started a project and never finished it. Everybody got to thinking we’ll finish the job — we’ll build this church.”
Methodist missionaries from the United States established the Evangelical Methodist Church of Costa Rica on April 26, 1917. To this day, the church remains independent from the United Methodist Church with its own bishop and General Board.
The Evangelical Methodist Church of Costa Rica, which has about 8,000 members, is more conservative than its North American mother church, and as its name implies, more evangelical.
Worship services often reflect the influence of the Pentecostalism prevalent in Latin America. The music tends to be lively and upbeat, and parishioners are not shy about clapping to the rhythm and raising their arms heavenward in praise.
Larry Acton, senior pastor of Jasper United Methodist Church and one of the mission team leaders, said what really excited him about the project was that La Iglesia de la Restauracion was ideally positioned to draw more people to faith in Christ.
Alajuela is Costa Rica’s second largest city with about 220,000 people, and La Iglesia de la Restauracion is near a major airport in the booming subdivision of Tuetal Sur.
Acton is a retired Volunteer in Missions director for the Oklahoma Conference, and he led the 2004 training session that launched the Costa Rican effort.
He worked with Heber Springs architect and fellow mission leader Jimmy Hudspeth in designing a church building that would be no mere concrete-block chapel but a church that would suit the multiple needs of its suburban congregation. He estimates that the main church building is at least 1,500-square-feet.
“This is the biggest United Methodist mission project ever undertaken by volunteers for the Costa Rican Methodist Church,” Acton said.
Altogether some 200 people from Arkansas have participated in the project. The endeavor also has attracted workers from out of state, including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama.
Since the project began, Acton has led eight teams of volunteers. On seven of those visits, the congregation invited him to preach in Spanish — a language he knows well.
In sharing the Word and establishing a relationship with the Costa Rican Christians, Acton said he “sensed family and our oneness in Christ.”
Les Oliver, the minister of music and worship at Central UMC in Rogers, took his church’s mission team to help with the project in January.
While there, the 19-member team painted the Sunday School classrooms in bright yellow and scenes of animals and nature.
Oliver said Central’s mission team members have traveled to more places than he could count.
But this trip was the first time he couldn’t speak the language of the people he was serving. At the church’s Sunday worship service, he experienced a mini-Pentecost.
“I sat in that worship service and did not understand a word,” he said. “But knowing that the Holy Spirit is moving through the congregation, it’s almost as though language was no barrier. It was electrifying.”
A mission trip lets people focus completely on God for a week, Parda said. Groups have devotions each day.
“You’re out there for God to use,” Parda said. “It’s the best vacation you’ll ever take, believe me.”
