Local minister visits South America in June

    Ainsworth resident Kitch Shatzer went on a trip down south in late June, and it wasn?t to Henry County. Shatzer?s voyage landed her on the other side of the equator in South America. She visited about a dozen Presbyterian churches in a city in Brazil called Fortaleza ? many of which she has visited in other recent trips to Brazil.

    Shatzer is the minister at the Ainsworth Community Church, and has made Fortaleza her home away from home. She is the primary communicator for the Presbytery of East Iowa in Fortaleza. She has visited the city five times since 2005, usually for a few weeks at a time. In 2006, she went with a group of women who focused on promoting women?s issues and women?s ministries in Brazil. A few years later, Shatzer took a one-month sabbatical to teach English in Fortaleza.

    Shatzer said she wouldn?t call herself fluent in Portuguese, but she has gotten to the point where she can understand the natives and they can understand her. She has been asked to give sermons in Portuguese, which she did by translating a sermon she had earlier given in English. 

    ?The congregation seemed to understand what I was saying,? said Shatzer.

    Shatzer described her mission work in Brazil not as ?street-corner evangelism? but as a ?goodwill ambassadorship.?

    ?Our philosophy of this partnership is that we are trying to strengthen each other?s ministries,? said Shatzer. ?The obvious way for us to strengthen the ministry in Brazil is to give them money. We do raise money for them, but they are the ones who design the project and carry it out. We ask them to identify their most important projects. We don?t go down to hammer nails and dig holes.?

    On her most recent trip, which lasted from June 16-26, Shatzer went to see what her friends in the Southern Hemisphere did to their places of worship with the money the Presbytery of East Iowa gave them.

    ?We had completed the phase of our fundraising and the money had been delivered, so we were interested to see what had happened with the various churches,? said Shatzer. ?They basically rebuilt a church with the $10,000 we sent down there. That would be impossible here.?

    The church that was rebuilt is known as the Barra Church (pronounced ?ba-ha? with the ?a? as in ?father?) which Shatzer saw before the renovation. She said the ceiling was falling apart and that the whole roof could have collapsed at any moment.

For the full story, see the Aug. 6 edition of The Washington Evening Journal