Our Vision
Over the last century, Mexico has been the most stable of the Latin American countries. In the last 10 years, and especially since the NAFTA trade agreement was initiated, Mexico's economy has experienced tremendous growth. To continue to experience this trend, Mexico's President, Vicente Fox, has made education and improved relations with the US priorities for his administration. In the area of education, his priorities are technology and the English language.
With the economic growth there has been a marked shift in Mexico's demographics and the country has undergone rapid urbanization. There are now 10 cities with a million or more people (Mérida is one). This shift has forced the government to sponsor large housing developments for a rapidly emerging middle class of young professionals and their families.
Our neighborhood is an example of this trend... we live in a development which started about 8 years ago. It is an area of about 2 square miles and consists largely of houses of 1 or 2 bedrooms (recently they have been constructing 3 bedroom houses). The houses are small and very close together... almost like living in a condominium. When construction is finished and the houses in the area are occupied, there will be about 30,000 people living in our neighborhood!
The challenge for the Church is to learn how to minister effectively in this new environment and our concern is to help develop community ministries and leadership to meet this challenge. Our involvement in Shalom Presbyterian Church and the establishment of SERFAM, our non-profit organization are the result of our pursuit of this goal.
As SERFAM establishes community programs in new neighborhoods (providing sports, recreation and educational services), we learn about community needs. We offer Bible based support and instruction to families involved in our programs... out of these contacts we establish a foundation for the development of a community church. Shalom helps by encouraging members to participate in the SERFAM programs and by providing leadership to help start new community churches.
In addition to the community service work, we have also seen the need to promote and develop Christian leadership through quality academic instruction. SERFAM has now opened the Educational Center "Blas Pascal" (in September 2001: see the SERFAM Link). We now have 120 students in our Jr. & Sr. High and hope to open an Elementary & Preschool in the 2006-07 school year. We are currently offering certification courses for teachers and eventually, hope to start a University offering varying degree programs in Education, Arts, Humanities and some Sciences (for more info see the SERFAM Update Page).
