In the book of Acts there is a phrase that ought to stop us in our tracks: “there was not a needy person among them.” It describes a season of extraordinary generosity in the earliest days of the church, when believers held everything in common, sold their possessions, and distributed the proceeds to anyone in need. It is important to say at the outset what that passage does not mean. For centuries certain theologians seized upon it to baptize liberation theology, socialism, even communism, as the truest Christian model of government—a reading that has cost millions of lives. But the text resists them. These believers gave voluntarily, moved by the Holy Spirit and not by the point of a gun. They did not surrender everything; they kept their homes and gathered in them, breaking bread “with glad and generous hearts.” What changes the entire dynamic is that no law compelled them. The Spirit simply made them zealous that no one among them should go hungry.
I raise the distinction because the place I want to tell you about has lived out the other story—the coerced one—for seventy years, and has reached its bitter end in starvation and want. That place is Cuba. And yet, in the very heart of that ruin, something is unfolding that reads less like a political tragedy and more like a page out of Acts. The church there, possessing almost nothing, is finding a way to give everything.
A City Gone Quiet
Our director of Latin American work, who has traveled to Cuba more than thirty times over the better part of a decade, returned from Santiago about three weeks ago and could hardly find words for what she saw. Santiago is no backwater. It is the second-largest city on the island, anchoring its far eastern tip as Havana anchors the west, and in better days its streets were crowded and its restaurants open well into the evening. She walked those same streets on a Friday at five o’clock—precisely the hour when a city should be coming alive—and found them barren. The stores were shut. The few horses still pulling buggies were gaunt to the bone. People sat on stoops along the road with a vacant gaze, and the word that kept surfacing was hopelessness.
The reasons are not mysterious. There is no fuel, so there is no way to move about and no reason to gather. There is no food worth speaking of, no reliable water, and electricity for perhaps two hours out of twenty-four—in a climate that routinely sits at ninety-five degrees. Nothing can be refrigerated, so nothing can be kept; every meal is a day-to-day improvisation. She saw families cooking the way their ancestors did, feeding sticks of wood into open fires because there is no other way to make a hot meal. Poverty has always shadowed Cuba, because socialism falters the moment human nature enters the equation—some end up with everything and most with nothing, and the promised redistribution never quite arrives. But this is something past ordinary poverty. This is a nation that has hit the floor.
Strangely, that very collapse has bred a flicker of hope. When things grow this desperate, people begin to believe that change can no longer be far off—that a true liberation might finally come, one that lets ordinary people buy and sell and build an economy that actually works. There is a buzz that something is coming. But for the most part, that hope is heard in only one place: the church.
The Lighthouse on the Block
Walk toward this particular congregation in Santiago on a Sunday morning and you hear it before you see it—praise and worship spilling into the street, gladness audible from a block away. In a neighborhood swallowed by darkness, it functions as a lighthouse. The church owns a generator, so the fans are turning and the air is bearable. People are singing, some are dancing, and faces that wore that vacant stare on the stoop are, inside these walls, beginning to smile. Where else, you find yourself asking, would anyone want to be?
And then, after the singing, they eat. Each Sunday the congregation pools what little it has to set out a warm meal for whoever has come that day. On the visit three weeks ago, a mother walked up off the street with three children and asked, simply, whether the church had a snack to spare. The pastor’s wife came down with a pitcher of juice and poured them each a cup at the very table where the weekly meal is served. It was a small thing and an enormous thing at once. The room could not hold the crowd; people pressed against the back walls, at least a hundred and fifty inside, with still more milling about outside to share in the food. The congregation has even built a kind of carport behind the building—a shaded hall—so that those who come to eat are not sitting in the blazing sun but resting in the shade while they are fed.
How a Pro-Life Church Learned to Feed a City
This is not where the story began. Eight years ago we came alongside this church with a single vision: to help them rescue babies, one mother and one couple at a time. It was a modest congregation then, perhaps fifty or sixty people, and over the years it shrank and grew through the loss and return of pastors. What revived it was the pro-life vision itself. The members began bringing in pregnant girls from the community who were in crisis, ministering to them, and watching many of them come to Christ. The church grew because it became a church that rescued the vulnerable—and that same instinct is precisely what now sends it into the streets with food.
Once people grasp that every human being is made in the image of God, the conviction refuses to stay in one lane. It moves them to rescue an unborn child pressured toward destruction, and then it moves them just as surely toward the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned, the elderly, the dying. It runs the whole span of a life. Critics of the pro-life cause like to claim that we care about children only until they are born and not a moment after. This church is the standing refutation. Its reverence for life is the very engine of its mercy to everyone in the community, down to the detail of building shade so the hungry can eat in comfort.
Doctors, Sewing Machines, and Five O’Clock Prayers
A second congregation on the same trip made the point even more vividly. It had become something close to a small hospital. Physicians of various specialties volunteer their time there, so that neighbors who could never otherwise see a specialist can be examined right inside the church. Under one roof there was a pregnancy center, a food bank, sewing machines where rescued mothers learn a trade, and a roster of volunteer doctors—among them a physician who once performed abortions and now spends his days doing ultrasounds, rescuing the very mothers and babies he once would have turned away. With no surplus of food or medicine, these believers do exactly what the first Christians did: they bring their little into common store and somehow it proves enough.
Holding it all up is prayer. Once a week, at five o’clock in the morning, the strongest members gather as an intercessory band and pray for a solid hour. And not long ago, on the twenty-fourth of May, something rarer still took place: across the whole island, evangelical Baptist congregations united at the same hour to intercede together, an entire nation of believers crying out to God for deliverance.
Joy in the Midst of Want
I cannot watch this without thinking of the second passage Luke gives us: “the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul… and great grace was upon them all.” That is the phrase that lingers—great grace. The hopeful going out to find the hopeless. A church with nothing discovering how to provide nearly everything. People fed first spiritually and then physically, sent home with both the gospel and a warm plate.
The political future of Cuba is beyond our pay grade. What is not beyond us is the church at ground level, vibrant and strong at the end of seventy years of engineered despair, and what is not beyond us is the chance to stand with it. Because of the embargo, money cannot simply be wired to Cuba; a gift labeled for the country would be flagged and held. But resources given to PassionLife and marked for food can be carried in through the relationships and trips we already maintain, and twenty-five dollars goes a remarkably long way there in times like these. More than that, pray for these believers. They are suffering, but they are not despairing—and they have something to teach the rest of us about joy in the midst of want.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.