Cross-Cultural Connections
In addition to our team of sent foreign missionaries, CHPC maintains two short-term mission fields in Croatia and Honduras to provide an opportunity for Christians to mobilize in partnership with the Reformed Church in Croatia and the Shoulder-to-Shoulder medical clinic in Honduras.
Santa Lucia, Honduras
In 1990, Dr. Jeff Heck, of the University of Cincinnati Family Practice Center, established a new medical clinic in one of the most remote villages among some of the worlds poorest people in Santa Lucia, Honduras. Dr. Heck, a member of CHPC, established the Shoulder-to-Shoulder program which empowered the indigenous people to organize and help build a medical clinic in their community. With their new found self-empowerment, the community organized and built a high school, and has now added a nutrition center to the medical facility.
CHPC began sending its youth and adults to Santa Lucia in the mid-90s and now sends teams annually to assist in construction at the medical facility and in the churches in the community. In 2000, CHPC adopted 5 churches of Iglesia Evangelica de Santidad located near the Santa Lucia medical center. Sunday school training, construction, and relationship-building have been the focus of the short-term teams to date. Christian education and counseling are soon to be added.
These churches serve some of the poorest people in Central America and are outposts on the edge of Christendom. These are indigenous churches with self-sustaining core congregations planted by the larger regional churches. These village churches make it possible for their members to be within an hour walk of their homes in these remote mountain areas.
CHPC also sponsors a small town named Leoncito as part of the Santa Lucia feeding center program. We provide the beans and rice for a community-run meal program that feeds a hot lunch to approximately 75 children each day. Village parents build, run, and maintain the kitchen adjacent to the school building. This program ensures that these nutritionally-starved youth receive a balanced diet sufficient to sustain healthy growth and development.
Osijek, Croatia
In 1993, Steven and Michelle Kurtz were commissioned by PC(USA) to go to Croatia to assist in the reconstruction of the Reformed Church in Croatia. After a pastoral visit from CHPC, a team was sent in 1998 with this purpose, “We go not so much to do as to be. We go as ‘a letter from Christ, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human heads.’”
At least two team go each year to provide some hands-on training and equipping in several different cities. Our focus church has been a new church plant in the old city of Tvrda. Alcoholics Anonymous, Peacemaking and Reconciliation, English as a Second Language, and Guitar ministries have been initiated and are continuing under indigenous leadership. All of these humanitarian-based services are delivered with an intentional focus towards the Gospel and drawing people into the Church who might not normally come.
A network of support churches is forming in the US providing opportunities to partner with churches in Chicago and California. Locally, we partner with North Presbyterian Church and other organizations in the Cincinnati area who are also committed to providing ongoing support to several areas in Croatia. We await God’s calling to see what He creates next.
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