Bringing God’s love to a Mexican village

Hernandez, 68, of La Pesca, Mexico, said the growth of the church still 26 miles from the nearest paved road started with one individual, a leather-skinned man everyone knows as Brother Jose.
Jose Lucio was the spiritual leader in the valley, patriarch of a religion that blended Indian mysticism with Catholic tradition. Lucio met Hernandez on a trip to another part of Mexico and — curious about “this Church of Christ and its book” — invited him to visit and study with him at his home.
Hernandez remembers accepting the offer noncommittally, but Lucio would have none of that. He insisted they set a date for a week-long visit, then met Hernandez at the fork in the road where necessity dictated that a visitor exchange a vehicle for a donkey to make the rest of the trip into the valley.
“That was a long, hard, wet trip,” Hernandez remembered. “Any part of it would have been difficult, but you combine the path, the distance and the weather and you can’t help but worry a little about making it.”
Hernandez made not only that journey, but two more. During the third one, Lucio asked Hernandez to come see the place where he wanted to be buried. The two men walked to Lucio’s property as Hernandez scanned the ground for a gravesite or tombstone. He saw only a deep hole that the elderly man had dug and filled with clear water from a mountain waterfall for his burial into Christ.
Hernandez baptized Lucio that day, and over the next few months, also immersed Lucio’s wife, Elena, and the couple’s 15 surviving children, their spouses, grandchildren, friends and neighbors.
“Literally, people would come out from behind cactuses and prickly pears when we began preaching the gospel here,” Hernandez said. “They didn’t want to come sit down at first, but they were there in the shadows, listening.”
In the past 25 years, the landscape here has changed dramatically. The Mexican government graded the once-treacherous footpaths into passable gravel roads. Poles and wires carry electricity to many of the small, colorful homes, government schools and tiendas, or tiny stores.