September 30, 2005
Dear friends in Christ,
We hope you are all well. Things are fine here in Mexico, where a new school year started a little over a month ago. As you can imagine, that’s always a busy time for all of us! Our daughter Monica Julie started 9th grade, and is enjoying playing soccer on her school’s team. It’s her last year in “Secundaria,” or Secondary School. Alicia began a new position at a bilingual school here in Mexico City, “Colegio Quetzal,” where she is assistant to the director. Her mother Agripina turned 90 in June, and we thank God that she is doing quite well for her age. Elizabeth just began her last year at Valparaiso, and is living off-campus for the first time. She is now going through the difficult process of discerning what comes next after she graduates.
At the Theological Community of Mexico and Augsburg Lutheran Seminary where I teach, our enrollment increased this year: about 70 students enrolled in the main study program of the Theological Community (including the four Seminaries); of those, six are enrolled at our Lutheran Seminary, which is the most we’ve had in several years. Three of these are new students—two of whom just had their civil wedding ceremony last Tuesday, Gerson Trejo and Tanya Tamez (niece of Elsa Tamez, a noted Mexican theologian who teaches in Costa Rica). One other student, Roberto Trejo, just received his Theology Diploma last week, after presenting and defending his thesis essay on Luther’s Ethics, and hopefully will be ordained soon. We took a picture of Roberto and some of the other students and professors of the Seminary that I am attaching, along with a photo of a get-together we had at the Methodist Seminary to celebrate Mexican Independence Day (September 16), and a photo of one of my classes where we had the visit of Dr. Graciela Chamorro, a visiting Lutheran theologian from South America currently teaching in Hamburg, Germany. So we are happy that things are going well at school.
At church, we said good-bye at the end of July to our intern from Luther Seminary, Lars Olson, whom everyone misses a great deal together with his wife Katherine, also a Luther student. It was a joy serving as Lars’ supervisor. We had a special ceremony at church to say good-bye to Lars. We also received another intern, Leslie Williamson, who with her husband Mark is also a student at Luther; so this year I am supervising Leslie as well, and enjoying working with her very much. A few Sundays ago we had a special service led by the children of the congregation. We have five students from the Theological Community and our Lutheran Seminary working as part of a pastoral team at our church, together with Dr. José Alcántara, another Seminary professor, and I just received word Wednesday that a couple of other students are now planning to come join us as well, which will be a real blessing. If you would like to learn more about our church, visit our website at: www.iglesialuterana.org.mx, or ask to be put on the mailing list for our church newsletter.
I would like to thank several of our sponsoring congregations that have supported our Seminary efforts: Christ Lutheran Church in Fairfield Glade, Tennessee and Epiphany Lutheran Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who provided help for scholarships for our Seminary students through a Level II project of the ELCA Division for Global Missions, as well as the AMIS group of Ascension Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who donated a computer through such a project. This support has been invaluable for us at the Seminary. Like our Seminary, many of our students have very limited financial resources, and depend on this kind of support to be able to study. And, of course, I would also like to thank all of our other sponsoring congregations—we now are up to 20!!!—for your support enabling me to serve in these ministries here. It means a great deal to us to have you remember us in this way, and through your prayers and interest in our work. We hope to get to know you better, not only by e-mail and continuing our visits there (next summer we will have home leave), but also hopefully by having some of you visit us here, as a few have done—please remember that the ELCA has programs at the Lutheran Center here for people to come learn about ministry in the Mexican context. A couple of our sponsoring congregations have brought groups, and we hope more will do so!
One other bit of news to share is that in July, Augsburg Fortress published a book of mine for the Lutheran Voices series titled, “The Letter and the Spirit: Discerning God’s Will in a Complex World.” I hope you get a chance to look at it, along with other of the Lutheran Voices series which are designed for congregational use.
As for prayer requests, we would ask that you continue to include us and our
work in your prayers, and especially Elizabeth as she makes decisions for her
future, as well as the students of the Theological Community and the Seminary,
and the work of our congregation.
We pray that God will continue to bless all of you, and look forward to hearing
from you. Thanks to those of you who send your newsletters and have been in
touch!
Yours in Christ,
David Brondos, together with Alicia, Elizabeth, and Monica Julie