Half a million Orthodox Christians in the mountains and on the coast of Guatemala.
Mayan villages in the highlands and plantation towns on the Pacific plain came into the Orthodox Church together. They have 134 churches, six clergy, and almost nothing inside the walls.
Half a million Orthodox Christians in the mountains and on the coast of Guatemala.
Mayan villages in the highlands and plantation towns on the Pacific plain came into the Orthodox Church together. They have 134 churches, six clergy, and almost nothing inside the walls.
The highlands
Villages above 7,000 feet around Huehuetenango, where the new Orthodox seminary opened in 2024 and the bishop was consecrated before thousands.
The coast
Nueva Concepción and the plantation towns of Escuintla, where Fr. Andrés Girón first brought the Maya into the Church. Work is seasonal, in bananas and coffee.
The road between
Two to four hours each way. Six clergy cover 134 parishes by pickup truck, leaving at five in the morning for a nine o’clock liturgy.
They followed their bishop into the Church. Now the Church has to follow them.
Fr. Andrés Girón was a parish priest for seventy-eight villages on Guatemala’s south coast, a land-reform leader who marched sixteen thousand campesinos to the capital, and a man his people trusted more than any institution. When he entered the Greek Orthodox Church, they entered with him.
That was the blessing. The demand came with it. Today Bishop Osios, the first Guatemalan-born Orthodox bishop, with two priests and three deacons, serves every one of those parishes himself.
parishes across the highlands and the coast
0
baptisms witnessed in one morning
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churches to be furnished first
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The buildings are still set up for a Catholic Mass. One table stands in for the Holy Table. There are no icons on the walls, no iconostasis, no vestments, no candles. The priest carries the only Gospel book from village to village.
Twenty churches. Four to six villages each. Everything still to build.
Give one item to one church, or furnish a whole sanctuary.