Pastor Rogelio leads a small church in Mexico, which has faced fierce persecution. Thanks to your support, our advocates have been able to stand alongside them, documenting a decade’s worth of violations and calling for action.

When Rogelio returned home at the end of 2015, something inside him had changed.

He had spent several months working in the fields of Coahuila (northern Mexico) as there were no work opportunities in his own village (Rancho Nuevo, Hidalgo State). While he was away, a colleague invited him to a local Baptist church, where he converted to Christianity.

Radical transformation

Having struggled for years with alcohol addiction and anger management, Rogelio returned to Rancho Nuevo transformed. People noticed such a significant change in him that they began to wonder what had happened! With the little understanding that he had, Rogelio explained that his radical change was due to what he had read in the Bible.

Rogelio started inviting people to Bible studies in his home, and by 2016, three families were attending regularly. Every week they met in a different house. They shared coffee and whatever was at home, without much preparation. With only a couple of months in his previous church, and although he had never been able to complete primary school, Rogelio became the pastor of a new church in Rancho Nuevo. They called it ‘The Great Commission’.

In the years that followed, the church continued to grow. But so did the opposition from the village leaders, who are Roman Catholic.

Sadly, it became normal for Rogelio and some of the church leaders to be confronted in the street – or for drunken men to bang on the fragile wooden doors of the church and on members’ houses with sticks and machetes – seeking to intimidate those they considered to be the cause of the disunity within the community.

By 2024, 35 families formed part of the church. In April that year, the violence and discrimination escalated to a level that made it impossible to stay. Community leaders threatened to use violence against all members of the church – including women – if they continued to speak about their faith in the community. A group of 176 people (more than half of them children) were forced from the villages of Coamila and Rancho Nuevo.

Progress and setbacks

They spent months living in an overcrowded sports complex before an agreement was finally reached with village leaders in September 2024. We were hopeful that this would mark the turning of a page. However, village leaders made it clear that they had no intention of honouring the agreement.

Villagers destroyed the doors of the church and several members’ houses, looting furniture and stealing the church’s electricity cables again. The families’ water tanks were pierced with machetes, their land was occupied, and a water well was appropriated.

Unable to return home, and under pressure to leave a sports complex that was never meant to be lived in, the group of displaced Christians decided to move elsewhere to start again. They’re now in the neighbouring state of Veracruz, where they have named their new community ‘Peace’ – their dream since 2015.

Pray:

For Pastor Rogelio and others facing injustice in Mexico.