n Educational opportunities for the Tarahumara are limited. School children like these are the fortunate ones

Hungry for the Word – ideally in their own dialect

Stories and photographs by Larry Jerden,
UBS Photojournalist

LAGUNA DE ARBOREACHI, Chihuahua, Mexico — In the difficult work of outreach among Mexico’s Tarahumara Indians, one pastor is honoured and accepted by both Christians and non-Christians alike.

His name is Eliseo Arvizu and he is the first Tarahumara person to pastor a fully-registered evangelical church. His people accept him because he is one of them. Many have known him as a child, later as an adherent of the traditional Tarahumara religious culture and now as a mature Christian leader.

Ten years ago Mr Arvizu was converted following a healing (see related feature). Today he leads a Four-Square Church which is the centre of evangelical outreach to the Tarahumara, providing training to new pastors, missionaries and teachers. With a congregation of 300 families, the church sponsors 12 missions in some 14 village areas. Each mission has somewhere between 15 and 100 families.

“Some Tarahumara who worship here walk for seven hours to a three-hour service – the women with babies on their backs,” says Mr Arvizu. “They are hungry for the Word.”

He is helping feed that hunger by working on the translation of two Scripture Portions – The Greatest Gift (a publication by WorldServe Ministries which uses a Bible Society text) and The Story of Jesus.
He himself has had no formal Bible training.

Training

“There is so much I don’t understand,” he says. “I need to have other brothers come and give me better understanding. As far as I know others are out there without training, too. Sometimes I get together with seven others – six men and one woman – to discuss and we share what God has taught us – but we need training materials!”

But the most important thing, he says, is to get the Bible into the dialect his people speak and understand.

“Right now the only Tarahumara New Testament available is not in our dialect, so it does not help us very much. We need it in our own dialect so that we can understand it.

“We need tracts, Portions, New Testaments and Bibles,” he says. “The Illustrated New Testament is most helpful because through the drawings, the people are better able to familiarise themselves with the stories. They always ask for them.

“Then we need the complete Bible because some people have heard stories about the prophets and the blessings they received, but they need to understand those stories and how they relate to the New Testament.”
Literacy materials are needed because educational opportunities for the Tarahumara are limited. The local schools go only to the sixth grade (11 years old) and parents put their children to work as early as seven years old.

“Most people around here can read to some degree,” he says. “But once they see a Bible, they want to learn to read better because they want to read God’s Word.

Materials

“We are asking the Bible Society to help us with literacy and teaching materials, for example by translating the Spanish Animals of the Bible into native languages for ages three to six. Then we need materials for ages six to 13.

“All the Christians who have been here a while have a New Testament,” he says, “but they are mainly in Spanish. This is putting the desire in people to learn Spanish but I preach in both languages.