Lessons from a Mexican Church
By: Jason Dekker
Tags: Mexico, Reformed Worship, Guadalajara, Reformed, Mission

It was August 12, 2019, a day I won’t soon forget. It would be my first day with a new employer. And for this new job, I got off a plane, went through customs, and was suddenly taking in the sights and sounds of a bustling third-world airport.

I had done something that I could not have imagined just weeks earlier. I had taken a job with a Mexican company. On this day, I would meet my new boss — in Mexico’s third largest city: Guadalajara.

My role with the company would be based in the United States, but frequent trips to the Central Mexican metropolis would be par for the course, that is, until a global pandemic suddenly halted travel in March of 2020. Prior to that, however, I would visit Guadalajara about a half dozen times.

During my visits I was delighted to learn that a core group of my Mexican co-workers were Christians and attended Iglesia Del Centro, translated “Downtown Church,” a local fellowship of believers in the reformed tradition.

The church was started by Josef Urban an Ohio-born missionary who felt called to start a church in Guadalajara before he spoke a lick of Spanish. Urban is now stateside, active in study and ministry in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Pastorate of Iglesia del Centro has been turned over to a Mexican native who is an amazingly gifted expository preacher.

Over the course of my half dozen or so visits in 2019 and early 2020, I had been invited to attend Wednesday night services at the church. I declined at the time and used rationale ranging from travel fatigue, the long workdays I was putting in while in Mexico, or concern that I would glean little from a Spanish language gathering of believers.

In late 2021, I was finally planning my first visit to Guadalajara in 23 months. I would work on projects with the team, visit customers, and attend the company posada. It would be a typical long and tiring work week, capped off by a 2:15 AM wake up time to catch my early Friday morning departure. Something was stirring in me, however, to extend my visit.

This was the year that I had finally read David Platt’s book Radical, a decade-old book at this point. It had been in my possession for several years as I had ordered a copy after it was recommended by a family member. I always find myself in “reading debt,” and this title for whatever reason sat gathering dust while I plowed through numerous other books ordered after it. Perhaps it was because I knew it would be a book that would challenge me versus my typical “joy reads” through topics that interest me such as economics, politics, and history.

The timing was in the providence of God.

In this work in which Platt challenges Christians to “rescue their faith from the American dream,” he lays out a multifaceted challenge at the end of the book, which he calls The Radical Experiment. One prong of the Radical Experiment is to spend one week in another context, meaning outside of America. On this part of the experiment, Platt gave the following prediction for those who followed his challenge:

“Here is where your heart is going to be touched, possibly in a way that it never has before.”

The Lord graciously enabled Platt’s call to find fertile soil in my heart, and so, on this trip to Mexico I would fly in the Friday before my scheduled workweek. I would commit to worshiping with this body of believers in Central Mexico. And I would trust God to work out whatever he had planned.

What God did in my soul as I worshiped with these Mexican brothers and sisters in a simple stucco-covered brick building with an A-shaped tin roof is not something that I can even begin to describe in this short blog post. The power of God was so active in their midst that I was buzzing for most of that Sunday with a sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence. At one point, which I will describe later, I was altogether overwhelmed. If anyone doubts whether Platt’s above-mentioned challenge is worth trying, let me assure you most definitely that to ignore it is to deny your soul one of the richest experiences available on this earth.

In the coming weeks, I hope to describe in greater detail why this experience made such an impact on me. I also will outline some of the key lessons I took away from this Mexican church. To whet your appetite a bit, I will list them below. I’ll then write more expansively on each in future posts.

Lessons from a Mexican church:

1. They provide an effective and attractive counterculture.

Guadalajara is a very dark place. It is largely secular or lapsed Catholic. It is known as the “San Francisco of Latin America,’’ and I am sure you can draw your own conclusions as to all such a label entails. It is filled with mysticism and even dabbling with the occult. For these reasons, there is not much of a Christian culture that this Mexican church can look to in their own context. Unlike their neighbors to the north, that will take cues from the decadent consumerist church that exists ubiquitously in America, these brothers and sisters look long and hard at the New Testament and exposit a model for themselves that I would argue much more closely resembles the 1st century church.

2. They are people of persistent and unrelenting prayer.

“I’ll pray for you” is largely a cultural pleasantry in most quarters of American Christianity. Just like most who say “Merry Christmas” do not intend to celebrate the arrival of Messiah, most who “send thoughts or prayers” intend very few thoughts and even fewer prayers. When this group of believers pledge prayer for you, however, they fully intend to go to war for you in their prayer life.

3. They actually believe that Jesus is Lord

In my short time with these Mexican Christians, I saw radical submission to Christ and his church. If such submission was merely suggested at an American church most congregants would reach for their pitch forks and lanterns, Gadsden flags, or worse yet, concealed carry weapon.

4. The difficult passages of scripture are lived out amongst these believers

Jesus said that, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26, ESV). In the conversations I had on that Sunday, it became clear to me that this is being lived out literally within this body of believers. I met with one young woman whose parents disowned her and refused to attend her wedding when she became a Christian and married a young man in the church.

5. ‘The sixth doctrine of grace’

As I looked at the wall clock to discover I had already been at church for more than four hours, a young man training for ministry quipped, “we believe in the sixth doctrine of grace: irresistible fellowship.”

I hope that I have sufficiently whetted your appetite for learning more about my Lessons from a Mexican Church. Please hit the “follow” icon and stay with me these next several weeks as I go into more detail on each of these five lessons and the implication for American Christians.

If you enjoy this content, please hit the “like” button and share this article in your social media feed. It is a small task for you but has big implications for growing the distribution of this story. My goal in sharing this experience is to hopefully, by God’s grace, spark a “great reassessment” amongst American believers.