Teaching the Teachers in Haiti

For over 15 years, Sue Gross has led the Haitian Lutheran Mission Project (HLMP) in its many short-term mission trips to Haiti, where they have provided a great deal of physical care for the people, including eyeglasses and daily meals for Lutheran school children.

Then one day, Sue had an epiphany. "Our mission society had been concentrating on the people's physical needs," she reflected. "All of a sudden, I realized that we've been neglecting their spiritual needs."

For the HLMP's next project, Sue took a different approach and contacted LHF for Haitian-Creole language Small Catechisms. She made plans with a Haitian Lutheran pastor, Pastor Isaac, to teach the catechisms to Lutheran school teachers in the remote villages of northern Haiti.

Then she recruited her longtime friend and retired Lutheran teacher, Mark Lillie, to teach (pictured below). The experience proved to be more than either of them had hoped.

"The catechism was an ideal teaching platform with its statements, and then questions about those statements," Mark said. "What does this mean? Who can benefit from this? We went through all of that. These Lutheran school teachers had never seen the catechism in their own language. They were just overjoyed to have it and gobbled it up!”

Mark and the school teachers spent their time going through the 10 Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed and more.

“They really liked studying the meanings of the 10 Commandments,” Mark said. “For example, what does it mean that you shall not kill? The teachers said they’d thought it was just like stabbing someone, but they learned it’s so much more than that. It was like a light going on in their heads.”

Catechism teaching will continue to be an important component of future HLMP mission trips, Sue emphasized. “We were taking it for granted that these Lutheran schools and their teachers were getting a Lutheran education,” she said, “but they weren’t! In Haiti, they just don’t have the same level of education we do here, so hopefully this will help.”

“We’ve gone to Haiti many times now, but this was the first time I ever had anything to give the people about the Lutheran faith that was in a language they could understand,” Mark said. “It was such a blessing; I’ve never experienced anything like that. To the teachers, these catechisms were like gold.”