“They may have our lady of light but they live in
darkness.” –Nazarene Pastor in Sao Vicente.
In Santo Antao, the landscape is too stunning for
words. Around each turn on this mountainous Island is a new demonstration of God’s incomparable beauty. Catholicism has a long heritage on the Island
as the huge statue of Saint Paul towering over the city of Paul (pronounced Pah-ul)
attest too. There is a new movement gaining ground in Paul called Rationalism.
Don’t be fooled by the name it is new sort of spiritualism a new way to worship
spirits. A Nazarene Pastor in Santo
Antao said about Cape Verdeans,“ They are very religious but not
followers of Christ.” This Pastor strives to make a distinction between himself
and the hundreds of the traditional Cape Verdean “Christians” who follow a
nominal Catholic faith or who use the name “Christian” to veil what is really
idol and demonic worship, “I call myself
a disciple of Christ.”
While in Paul we set off to try and discover a small
Baptist Congregation we had learned about through our travel. We had been told
that the leader of this church spoke English but soon learned from the lack
communication that was occurring over the phone that he did not. Never the
less, after a few calls back in forth we were met by two young men outside our
hotel and invited up into the mountain to visit their church. The mode of
transportation was a bush yassi or what we would call, a pickup truck with wood
benches in the back. I clutched the wooded bench, digging my fingernail in, as
we bumped along the winding roads of
Santo Antao. We thought the church was in Paul where are hotel was located, but
minutes ticked by and we were still swerving and climbing high and high into
the mountains. When our friend finally stopped there indeed was a small
building tucked under a steep cliff with the words “Igreja Baptista” painted
across it in a pine green. We stood about a bit trying to communicate with our
new friends through the limited English they knew and the limited French and
Spanish that we knew. We asked to meet the leader wife (we had heard a false
rumor that she spoke English), at their house we met her and their little baby
girl. Their house was situated on the edge of a cliff, a little hovel really
but it over looked a vast valley and to the left a water fall was flowing from
the even steeper cliffs above, gorgeous. How could anyone live here? How does a
place like this actually exist? Throughout our travels around Santo Antao, I
would periodically exclaim, “Nope! Rita, it’s just too beautiful, it can’t be
real.” Despite their unreal surrounding there was a very real since of
hopelessness in this small gathering. As we talked with the church leader and
his wife (mainly through charades) we learned that the missionary that had
founded the church had left a few years earlier and the church was now
struggling to survive. Though they continue to meet on Sundays they have no
pastor. In the Catholic and Nazarene churches that surround them, there is a
strict protocol to follow in order to be ordained as a pastor. The term “lay
pastor” is not something understood in Cape Verde, everything is very conventional.
It made my heart sad to see two young men very capable of (and actually
already) leading their congregation yet feeling helpless and abandoned. As we
found in Liberia, Cape Verde already has the godly men and women who have the
vision to reach their nations but many simply do not know how to start or that
they can do it themselves. Pray that G0d will send vision to the believers in
Cape Verde to go out into their own communities and to lead their own mission
movement. Ask God to send them teachers and mentors.
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