From the windows of the church, there is a spectacular view of the valley filled with farms and sparsely dotted with houses. The ragged edge of the mountains turns gold in the setting sun, illuminating the rocks scattered at their peaks like broken teeth.
Inside the church, there are two columns of pews separated by a center aisle. Women sit on the left, men sit on the right. There are more women than men, and this is where the youth is: young women fill the pews with babies strapped on their backs in warm bundles of blankets.
One woman in a green-plaid poncho reminds me of my grandmother, with a thin, lined face and smile that requires coaxing. She is in charge of a three-year-old named Cynthia with dirty overalls and greasy hair, who talks through the whole service. The women pack in together, close to the front, but they leave the first two pews open for our team.
This church, in Yanacancha Baja, is the larger of the two my team visited in the two weeks we spent in the mountains. It is pastored by Eloy, a former alcoholic who has been attending the church since a Baptist missionary started it twenty years ago. When they worship, Eloy stands to the side at the front and sings along as his son, Walter, leads.
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The other church we visited is an hour-and-half hike (literally uphill both ways), in a farming community called Negritos. This church is built higher up a mountain opposite of Yanacancha, and we can see the roof of the mission house from the front door. The pastor of this church is a petite man named Juan, who has been pastor for seven years.
One of the deacons of the Negritos church is named Damian. He is in his late fifties, and used to pastor a church in a neighboring town, but now he is a farmer with permanent smile lines around his eyes. Juan, Damian, and my team sit in his wife’s flower garden and talk for hours when we visit, and he peppers us with questions from the serious to the silly, all with the same intense gaze: “Another church says women shouldn’t wear pants- what do you say to that? How do angels eat? Why do we take communion?”
Our eyes widen a bit at the questions. Later, Juan will tell us that his church hasn’t taken communion in six years because he doesn’t want to do it wrong.
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These churches are scrabbling for survival just as hard as the people who fill the pews. They are filled with mountain people with wind-burned cheeks, and so few resources to answer the simple questions of faith that even Pastor Eloy and Juan have.
When we went back for our second week in Yanacancha, we brought Bible commentaries and children’s stories, daily devotionals and a Spanish Bible that had the Old and New Testaments in it. Meggie and Christina and Jami spent the better part of an hour crouched in front of the shelves in a Christian bookstore in Catamarca, trying to decide which books would be best for a congregation that didn’t even have copies of the full Bible in the pews, just the New Testament and Psalms.
The women packed the pews with their babies, and the men asked earnest questions and exclaimed over a Bible commentary like it was made of gold.
And even though I saw so much injustice this month, so much poverty and heartache and questionable theology, this is the biggest injustice I saw: the people I met were hungry. They so badly wanted to be fed, but they didn’t have the resources to go beyond simple Bible stories- no seminary degrees, no church conferences, no Google.
Juan and Damian leaned in to listen to Jami answer questions about demons and grace and the fruits of the spirit, their shoulders and knees pointed straight towards her. We had a question-and-answer session on our last day in Yanacancha, and our answers were treated with such reverence it made me uncomfortable.
But this is also where I saw the Holy Spirit moving so powerfully: these hungry people understood so much of grace, so much of faith. They knew how to trust in the Lord with all of their understanding, and they were so hungry to expand that understanding, to have more than a child-like faith. To be filled up on the richness of the bread of life.
