by Elio Eduardo Muller Jr.
The Lord has just expanded the borders of our mission field. For the past ten years Cuba has been making significant progress in freedom of religion. The Cuba United Methodist Conference has grown to more than 400 congregations, they have opened a wonderful retreat camp, and more recently they refurbished the building of a pre-revolution Methodist girl’s school into a great new seminary. Now it seems that Cuba is inviting us back to the roots of Wesleyan tradition in ministering to incarcerated prisoners. John and Charles Wesley started out while as seminarians at Oxford, ministering to eighteenth century English debtor’s prisons where many people were incarcerated for merely not being able to pay their debts.
The Cuban Government has recently announced that it will allow incarcerated prisoner to openly worship in jail. That means that prisoners will be able to meet, use hymn books and crosses in their services. Unfortunately the policy will also allow for non-Christian religions like Voodoo and Santeria to be practiced by prisoners. This means that the blessing comes with a challenge to Christian churches on the island. If Christians do not step up the missionary work to minister to these prisoners, then only Santeria will be alone in filling this new space. Much like the debtor prisoners in the Wesley brother’s early missionary work, prisoners in Cuba are mostly incarcerated for petty crimes, political opposition, or for just trying to flee the island on boats. We here in Florida should also hear this missionary call. The Cuba/Florida Covenant has a great program of sister church support that will allow us to extend our love and our gifts into this important work www.cubafloridacovenant.org. We should be looking for this program to call on us in the near future to support this new mission field.













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