Made for Mission in Mexico

By Andrew McChesney, Adventist Mission

Gustavo Taracena is not a pastor, but he has a passion for planting churches.

Image © Pacific Press

Gustavo, a 58-year-old retired customer service representative for a Mexican telecommunications company, praised God when his second church plant, located in La Huasteca, a small community on the outskirts of Villahermosa, Mexico, became a full-fledged church in ten years. But he wasn’t sure what to do next. He and his wife, Maria Hernandez, prayed.

“What do You want us to do this coming year?” he prayed.

After praying for a few weeks, Gustavo learned from the district pastor about hopes to plant a church in Playas del Rosario, another small community outside the city. He prayed for three weeks and agreed to helm the project.

But where to meet? That problem was solved when a church member offered his house for the Sabbath meetings. He didn’t live there, so Gustavo could use the house freely. It wouldn’t cost a peso.

On the first Sabbath, two mothers and twelve children joined Gustavo and his wife to worship. Seeing so many people at the first meeting, he felt that God was blessing the project and he could move forward.

He organized weeklong evangelistic meetings in the house church, and the number of children increased to twenty. With so many children, Gustavo decided to conduct a special Sabbath School for children on Sabbath mornings and a worship service for both children and adults in the afternoons.

Trouble struck one of the two mothers who was attending every Sabbath. The owner of the house that she rented saw that she was going to the meetings and threatened to evict her and her five children. “If you keep going to those meetings, you will have to leave,” the owner said.

The mother kept going to the meetings, and she was evicted. But she was not discouraged. She found a new house to rent and continued worshiping.

At the house church, worshipers prayed and intermittently fasted for the former landlord. During a literature distribution drive, she accepted an Adventist magazine and asked for prayer. A few weeks later, she accepted a loaf of sweet bread from a church member and asked for more prayers. She has become a friend of the house church.

Gustavo, meanwhile, organized a second set of evangelistic meetings, this time in an Adventist church located a half-mile (one kilometer) away in a neighboring community. A woman and a boy were baptized at the meetings, becoming the first fruits of his church plant. The house church had its first two members just four months after opening.

“By faith we know that God will add more members and our small group will grow into a full-fledged church,” Gustavo said.

Thank you for your Thirteenth Sabbath Offering three years ago that helped expand the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Southeast Hospital in Villahermosa, Mexico.

Produced by the General Conference Office of Adventist Mission. Find more mission stories at adventistmission[dot]org

Print/PDF/Email