About 10 years ago, Ricardo Reznichek headed south on a mission for his Hermosa Beach church: The goal was to find a village in Latin America that needed financial help.
A priest driving a beat-up old car picked him up at a hotel in Belize, and the two men drove for miles toward the rural fields of the impoverished country. The Rev. Irineo Martir Vasquez, known as Father Martir, introduced his American companion to a group of farmers who gathered for Sunday services outside in the fields.
They had no money for a church building but, with Vasquez’s help, they had a church.
“He would drive out all this way to minister to these people,” Reznichek said. “I saw in him then just an extraordinary person who had that ability to help people and make things happen. He is a person who really wants to make progress in the world.”
He’s the sort of priest TEC needs more of.
“John Wilkins”
Although I don’t disagree with you, I think it is equally true, and perhaps moreso, that this is the kind of priest needed in Belize.
Thus I am immediately conflicted in support for Fr Irineo Martir. What TECUSA needs most of all is to ask the Holy Spirit to raise up ministries for the people we have here in our neighborhoods; with the influx of Latinos into the USA over the last 30 years that would seem obvious. And yet, even with the agenda cry for leadership in ethnic diversity, TECUSA lags seriously in its ability or perhaps willingness to mobilize such ministry. As a result, the relative ease of simply pushing forward an agenda of diversity in leadership, versus the hard work of doing the ministry itself, has caused the astro-turfing of diverse leadership.
Clergy like Fr. Irineo get sucked into that kind of vortex, probably innocently enough. Still, it is very difficult to not say yes to an US job vs a job of similar porportions in a Central American nation and church — the economics are monstrous. It would be my hope and delight to know that Fr. Irineo was sent by the Holy Spirit, to his delight, to work as a missionary for the raising up of such ministry in LA and subsequently TECUSA as a whole. Whether by the Holy Spirit’s action, or the seduction of materialism, I feel sorry for the diocese and people from which he left.
The thing is, John Wilkins, clergy like Fr Irineo have been brought into TECUSA from what we would label as Latino nations and churches for a long time, individually. Then we wear them out with American ministry demands, and then, hopefully before they are “gone”, honor them for their Latino ministry. Where is the ministry strategy initiative in that??
Here, though, would be my non-conflicted hope for Fr. Irineo now that he has been put forward as a finalist nominee: that he truly has a chance to be elected as Suffragan for LA, and then is given room for two ministry objectives:
1) to be a suffragan in line of how LA has defined that position to this point, bringing his personal charm and hopefully apostolic gifts to the whole diocese;
2) to help develop both on the diocesan, the provincial and the TECUSA-wide levels a comprehensive strategy for the development of Latino ministries (in conjunction with the evangelism resolution passed at GC in the same regard). This might indeed include the further drafting of non-domestic Latino ordained and lay ministers into TECUSA, but not without quid pro quo. This might look like placing locally-raised Latinos in ordained ministry tracks back into those non-domestic dioceses and Churches from which others came, for a season or two. Otherwise, it looks a lot like strip mining, or logging, with nothing replaced. Even Weyerhauser knows you’ve got to put trees back where you just cut them down, even if it so you can go back later and log the next generation.
Now, I recognize your comment may have had nothing to do with Fr. Irineo Martir Vasquez being of Latino descent, and Hispanic ministry in the Church, and force-fed diversity in leadership. And it may have had everything to do with an Episcopal priest who can, given the context, actually grow a parish. So, let me challenge you to not simply toss out such a ministry-critique grenade, but to offer your strategy for recruiting, and developing, more clergy like Fr. Martir.