Our Partnership With Nueva Paz 
Hermanamiento. Partnership. Juntos en Cristo. Together with a small church in Cuba, we’ve formed a partnership of two church families worshiping and walking together for over 10 years. Assuming no global health crises, every year a small group travels to Havana and to Nueva Paz, Cuba to live, work and worship with our Presbyterian brothers and sisters. Check out the history of our partnership and stories from some of our most recent trips below and then picture yourself on the next trip!
2022 – New Year, New News!
While we’ve been unable to travel to Cuba for the last 2 years, we have been in regular contact with our Nueva Paz family and have continued to pray for each other during these challenging times in both of our countries. Our Mission Committee has also continued to find ways in which to support their good works with both funding and with medicines.
Throughout the ups and downs of the pandemic, our brothers and sisters in Nueva Paz have continued to serve their congregation and their community by providing masks, medicines, meals, and purified water. They’ve weathered sickness, loss, the closing of their church buildings and schools, and economic hardship. And found creative ways to worship together, yet apart, thanks to WhatsApp.
Now, with the New Year, there is renewed energy focused on several new opportunities and new projects. And church! Epiphany was celebrated with a fun, festive outdoor event for the children. Sunday School for all ages is back in session. Seniors are once again gathering every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the breakfast program at the church. Their mission church in the town of Vegas now has an installed pastor, Lianne, and they’ve acquired a small home there which will serve as a manse AND as a temporary gathering place for the small congregation once they begin repairs to that church’s roof – a project they anticipate starting soon, after many years of planning.
We, too, are looking forward to new opportunities to deepen the connection between our two congregations this year as we continue to work and grow together as partners in mission. Not only because we are hoping and praying for the opportunity to travel to Nueva Paz this year, but because we know the joy and beauty of being connected by prayer, hope, and concern for each other. Juntos en Cristo. We are together in Christ.
In celebration of 10 years of partnership, we visited our friends in Nueva Paz in mid-November, 2019. Attempting to leave Chicago on one of the snowiest Mondays of the year, Pastor Erik, Kevin McDermott, Mindy McMahon and Kathy Wennerstrum spent nearly 17 hours together in O’Hare before re-routing through Newark (arriving Newark at 2:30 am) Read More
An active and long-time member of Presbyterian Women, Jane Boxell applied for a Thank Offering grant to help our friends in Nueva Paz launch a new program – The Nueva Paz Presbyterian Church Breakfast Club. Thanks to the generosity of PW and their annual Thank Offering, we were awarded $2,000, the full amount requested! Read More
Years before the words “Living Waters for the World” (LWW) became familiar to our congregation, they were familiar to many other churches and congregations across the United States and around the world. By March of 2017, LWW had already installed water purification systems in over 800 communities throughout 25 countries. In Cuba alone at that Read More
Our engagement with the Presbyterian Church in Cuba began in 2008 when Loretta Gratias-Bremer & Ann Beran Jones visited Cuba with a group from the Presbytery of Chicago, visiting Havana-area churches and celebrating a covenant that had been established between the Chicago and Havana Presbyteries in 1999. The church in Nueva Paz was one of Read More
To read about our earlier visits to Nueva Paz, click here.
If you’d like more information on our partnership with Nueva Paz please contact Kathy Wennerstrum.