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D. L. Moody, before he became an evangelist, was talking with an Irishman, Henry Varley, who made a statement that kindled a fire in Moody’s heart. Varley said to Moody, “The world has yet to see what God can do with and through the man who is totally committed to Him.” Moody prayed, “Lord, I want to be that man.” D.L. Moody’s impact for the Kingdom of God is legendary.

In Boston, Sol Védrine is another man who purposes to give himself wholeheartedly to God, and the spiritual fruit from that obedience continues to draw people to Christ. The story of Sol Védrine sheds light on the inner workings of Boston’s Quiet Revival, the Emmanuel Gospel Center, and the Haitian community. It shows how it is possible to continue to write new chapters in the Book of Acts through obedience to God’s call and perseverance over the long haul.

Soliny Védrine was born in L’Asile, Haiti, one of seven children of a tailor, Sauveur Védrine. Sol’s father was a godly man who encouraged his children to read aloud from the Bible and to sing during their nightly family devotions. At great financial sacrifice, Sauveur sent his son Sol off to school in Port-au-Prince when he was just 14. Ten years later, Sol graduated from the state university with a law degree. Later, with a seminary degree, and married, Sol hit an impasse. Confused and discouraged, Sol and his wife called out to God and heard an unexpected answer…

A NIGHT OF PRAYER

In June of 1972, I was at a crossroads. I was discouraged because a year had gone by since I had graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary, and I hadn’t raised a penny to go back to Haiti, which was my goal. So after preaching at a church in New York City, God sent two ladies my way to ask me whether I would accept a night of prayer from them. In the middle of the night one of them said, “Brother Védrine, what should we pray for?”

I said, “Please ask the Lord to tell me what to do! I heard the call for the ministry, went to seminary, but now I have been trying to raise funds to go to Haiti and I cannot raise any money. If he has something else in mind, let me know.”

By the time the two ladies left, we were tired and hungry. We were glad we prayed, but we were glad they left! That afternoon, one of the sisters came back and said, “We have found the answer to your prayer.”

I said, “What is the answer?”

The sister said, “Boston.”

“Boston!” I said. “How do you know?”

She said, “Mr. Jean-Pierre, who lives in Boston, just came to spend the weekend with us. And he keeps complaining that Haitians are pouring into Boston by hundreds yet there are no churches. So I tied up his complaint with your request!”

She put me in contact with Mr. Jean-Pierre. And he said, “Come to Boston! We need you. Haitians are coming from New York to Boston. You should come, Brother. Come!”

PLANTED IN BOSTON

In December, 1972, when Sol and his wife, Emmeline, obeyed God’s call to go to Boston, hundreds of Haitians were moving into the city. One small Baptist church and a Seventh Day Adventist group were the only two Haitian fellowships serving the growing population.

When I first got here, I made 125 phone calls to every church in the Yellow Pages. I introduced myself and said I had graduated from Dallas Seminary and I had come to work with the Haitians. And the only person who came to see me was Rev. Don Gill (former president of the Evangelistic Association of New England, now Vision New England). He came to the place where I was staying, talked to me for several hours, gave me some advice, and said, “Let me know how things go.”

During the winter months, I visited family after family, sharing the Gospel and my dream to start a new church. With my wife, Emmeline, and our new friend, Lucien Jean-Pierre, I organized prayer meetings that started to draw a growing crowd. Afraid of falling into debt, we avoided the high cost of renting a hall for a regular Sunday morning worship service and shared the facilities of an American church, meeting on Sunday afternoon, for the meager charge of $40 a month for about eight years. Then, difficulties arose, and, reluctantly, I found myself buying a dilapidated former funeral home that defied repairs; yet our Haitian congregation called it home for eleven years. Later, in 1991, we demolished it to erect in its place the first Haitian-built church building in New England, the Boston Missionary Baptist Church.

The Lord led me to come to Boston, but when my wife had her first baby, we didn’t have enough funds, so I decided to take a secular job. I was a welder for eight months and I then took a bookkeeping job for eleven years while working many hours developing the church. And I learned that that has been the pattern for nearly all the Haitian pastors. We are all bi-vocational.

HAITIAN COMMUNITY GROWS

While Sol was occupied with his new church and his growing family, Haitians continued to move to Boston, and more and more new churches were planted by Haitian leaders who, like Sol, were called by God to the work. By the 1980’s, new churches were starting every few months. Pastor Sol remembers those years of growth and struggle:

From time to time we would hear of a new prayer group, or a new church. But those were years of instability. Haitians would come and go. You could not count too much on your congregation; many were being hunted by the Immigration Service, whose jails were always full. Others left because they had not found in Boston the easy jobs they had heard about. And everybody, pastors and congregations both, thought they were here only for a short time—until the Duvalier regime back home would be over. The common view held that Haiti was the paradise, and saints and sinners would return there.

EGC’S HAITIAN MINISTRY

The growth of the Haitian community in Boston, while invisible to some, did not escape the attention of the Emmanuel Gospel Center, whose mission is to understand and discern ways to help nurture urban churches, particularly in low-income and immigrant communities. In October, 1981, Marilyn Mason came to work at EGC. Marilyn had already served as a missionary for 16 years in Haiti, Zaire and other fields. Between 1981 and 1983, Marilyn began to pioneer a work among the Haitian churches. The initial goal of EGC’s Haitian Outreach was to act as a liaison, making known the needs of Haitian believers to the greater Boston Christian community. In June, 1983, Marilyn convened a gathering of Haitian pastors at the Center, the first of its kind.

Later that year, Marilyn left Boston, but before she left, she suggested that the Center find a way to help Pastor Sol leave his accounting job to dedicate himself fulltime to helping Haitian churches grow in Boston. This sentiment was affirmed in conversations with Haitian leaders who also asked the Center to help Sol serve fulltime. So Doug Hall, EGC’s Director, and now President, created the position of Haitian Minister-at-Large and sought funding so he could offer Sol this opportunity.

I remember he called me when I was at the accounting office. So we met for lunch and he talked to me about whether I would be willing to leave my accounting job and come by faith to the Gospel Center to begin these connections. The strange thing was that that was my prayer, too!

During the years that the churches had grown from twelve to fifteen to twenty, the ministers had the same fears that they had back in Haiti. They belonged to various denominations and the cooperation was so difficult. They did not work together because they were afraid of each other. And there was no forum to share even the problems of the churches themselves. It was my dream to create a forum where pastors could have fellowship and discuss problems.

So we talked about it for a year and a half before my wife and I could say yes and trust the Lord to “leave what you have and take hold of that which you don’t have!” The Lord is gracious and powerful, and a few suburban churches became interested in what we were doing, and made it possible for me to leave my job at a plumbing supply company and come here full time, and, over time, to do God’s work.

On November 4, 1985, I joined the staff of Emmanuel Gospel Center as Minister-at-Large to the Haitian Community. What came to mind first was how to bring pastors together—how to create a forum. The first thing was to plan a pastors’ convention. So on December 2 we had our first Haitian pastors’ convention. Fifty-six leaders (pastors, wives and lay leaders) came to discuss problems, to have fellowship, and so on. From that time on, since 1985, we have had a pastors’ convention year after year, the first Saturday of December.

CHURCHES WORK TOGETHER

In 1987, two years after Sol started work at EGC, the Haitian pastors sponsored a conference to begin to learn together how to do missions both in Boston and back home in Haiti. This was a radical idea for an immigrant church made up of many refugees. It was Sol’s desire that Haitian Christians in Boston, usually on the receiving end of missions work and not having significant resources at their disposal, would be challenged to gain a heart for service.

One unexpected outcome of the mission conference was that the pastors who formed the steering committee continued to meet after the event and became the Haitian Committee on Missionary Action. The committee became a forum for visiting ministers from Haiti to be heard, encouraged and guided as well as a focal point to discuss the problems of ministry. Further, it became a united voice to address social needs while it continued to serve as a catalyst to coordinate missions and pastors’ conferences for the churches.

As EGC’s minister-at-large to the Haitian community, Sol’s work among the churches included networking, helping pastors to secure services which can strengthen churches, helping pastors obtain Christian literature and church materials in French and Creole, and encouraging pastoral training through Gordon-Conwell’s urban extension, the Center for Urban Ministerial Education.

Sol’s legal training also often came into play as he assisted pastors to obtain church incorporation or to become licensed to perform marriages, and he worked with many who had needs surrounding their immigration status. “The Kingdom of God exists among the kingdom of men,” Sol says, “so we must teach churches how to operate within the expectations of the law.” Today Sol uses his legal expertise helping churches in Haiti in much the same way.

LAUSANNE II

In the summer of 1989, EGC sent Sol as a delegate to the Lausanne II Conference, also called the “International Congress on World Evangelization,” in Manila, the Philippines. Sol was among 4,300 delegates from 173 nations considering how to bring the message of Christ to the whole world. The conference caused him to wonder what the state of Christianity was for the Haitian Diaspora. After decades of economic and political turmoil, Haitians had dispersed not only to the U.S., but to many nations around the world. Sol reasoned that the quickest way to find out how the Church was doing was to gather leaders from the nations together to talk about it. Little did he know that almost ten years would pass before that vision was fulfilled. Meanwhile, Sol gave his attention to nurturing his church and the growing ministries among the Haitians in Boston.

FELLOWSHIP OF PASTORS AND THE BOSTON CRUSADE

In 1991, with 45 churches in their network and 40,000 Haitians in the region, the Haitian Committee on Missionary Action reorganized as the Fellowship of Haitian Evangelical Pastors of New England. At first, Sol served as President, and much of the work of the Fellowship and its programs fell on his shoulders. But over time he passed the reins on to new leaders, while continuing to serve as a consultant. Now, in 2004, there are 75 churches on the roster, mostly from Boston, but also along the East Coast from Manchester, New Hampshire, to Providence, and one from Hartford. Of these 75, a core group of 45 to 50 churches are “more visible,” Sol says, regularly attending the meetings and helping with events.

Gathering the pastors together proved to be such a help to foster unity in the church, that Sol reasoned it may also be an encouragement to gather the church members together as well. Thus the first Boston Haitian Crusade was held in July, 1993. Haitian Christians from 11 denominations filled an auditorium to enjoy worship and teaching together for a weekend of meetings. The Fellowship has continued to sponsor the Crusade every year since, providing for the 2,000 to 3,000 participants an annual homecoming, a sense of identity as members of a larger Haitian Christian community, and rich spiritual encouragement and refreshment. Sol explains how this annual event is changing.

This year we held the 12th annual Boston Crusade. For the first time, we did not rely on outside speakers, but invited only local preachers: Rev. Tony Kebreau, Rev. Paul Exinor Fevrier, and Rev. Dieudonne Raymond. Once again, it proved to be a wonderful experience, with participation of believers from all over Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. It was a time of rejoicing before the Lord while making the Word of Salvation known to many.

THE BAHAMAS CRUSADE

One morning in May, 1993, one of the Haitian leaders in Boston introduced Sol to Rev. Cherilus Exante, a visitor from the Bahamas. It had become routine for visiting clergy to meet with Sol when they came to Boston. Sol would then help them to network into the Haitian community, suggesting places where they might speak and people they should meet. Sol was deeply touched by the meeting.

Rev. Exante is a pastor, church planter, social worker, and, above all, the popular advocate of the Haitians before Bahamian governmental agencies, in particular the Immigration Service. His biggest cry is that the ministry is heavy and crushing. He has no one to turn to because his ministry isn’t supported by any local or foreign agency. He is simply on his own doing a work of love in the name of the Lord to those who need it most. I sincerely sympathized with his cry. I have met many such cases before.

That fall, Sol invited Rev. Exante to return to Boston to speak to a gathering of Haitians in Boston, who raised some initial support for his work. The following year, in September, 1994, Sol traveled to the Bahamas for a fact-finding tour. He learned that 40,000 Haitian exiles live near Nassau, but they live without rights, education, and health care. There he found thriving Christian churches in make-shift villages. Some congregations had started church buildings, despite their poverty and illegal status. Sol wondered what he could do to encourage the churches there and help them to spread the Gospel among the refugees. He wrote in a report from his trip, “The Haitians of the Bahamas are to be seen as a mission field that deserves our best attention. I worry a lot about the lack of a ministerial training school, lack of even Sunday School materials, lack of guidance to the churches on how to best serve their people in their critical situation. … Yet the greatest contribution we can ever bring is in the spread of the Gospel, the seed of blessing in this life and in eternity.”

With support from Christians in Boston and in other places where the Haitian churches were thriving, Sol began to apply the same methods he found valuable in Boston. He first helped Rev. Exante and his colleagues create a network of 19 pastors to work together. He launched an annual week-long crusade, holding the first in 1996, bringing speakers from around the world, but also bringing other help, such as programs for youth and for women, and even a medical clinic. Three thousand gather for the meetings.

In May, 2004, four doctors, a dentist, and several nurses operated the clinic, serving 1,100 Haitians, and disseminating $47,000 of donated medications. Haitian Christians from the U.S., Canada, France, Haiti, Martinique, the Dominican Republic and from the Bahamas worked together to serve at the Crusade.

This was our ninth such undertaking to minister to the ever-growing Haitian immigrant population of that small country. As in the past, some of our best preachers from Haiti, the U.S., Canada and the Bahamas itself preached the Gospel powerfully to a full auditorium. As hearts were touched by the Word, hundreds came to the foot of the cross either to give themselves to Christ or rededicate their lives to Him.

It is of special interest to note that at least l0 of our Boston Haitian churches sent participants to the Bahamas Crusade to serve in one capacity or another, many with the medical team.

A GLOBAL VISION

In November, 1997, Sol shared his long-held dream of a gathering of Haitian Christian leaders from across the Haitian Diaspora to come together to assess the state of the Gospel among the Haitians with a friend, Chavannes Jeune, a leader among the churches in Haiti. Pastor Jeune challenged Sol to make his dream come true.

With encouragement from Rev. Jeune I finally settled on a date and place. The event was scheduled for November 5-7, 1998. Delegations came to this gathering from the U.S., France, Canada, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and Jamaica.

The second Vision Globale Conference was held in November, 2003. As before, Sol was deeply involved in networking and conference preparation.  

On the first day, we had over 100 delegates. By the end, 200 key leaders from 10 countries took part. What encourages me is that the participants… agreed to meet every three years. The next will be in November, 2006, in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic.

GLOBAL MINISTRY

Because of my involvement as initiator and international coordinator of Vision Globale, my contacts with Haitian church leaders around the world have greatly increased. This summer, I have been receiving a lot of visitors, each one of them wishing to talk with me about his ministry in order to receive some guidance. Pastor Laudace Viljean of the Haitian immigrant church on the island of St. Maarten is expecting me in April, 2005, to lead a seminar on family life and help with the Bible school  there. We hope leaders from Guadeloupe and Martinique will join us.

For the past three years, the Haitian immigrant church in La Romana, Dominican Republic, has been sending delegates to the Bahamas to observe our ministry. Now they are anxiously waiting for my help to come and lead them in organizing something similar. So this fall, I will be meeting with delegates from the Haitian churches there to organize the first Haitian International Gospel Crusade of La Romana, to be held in November, 2005. The Haitian population in the Dominican Republic is very needy of our encouragement.

REBUILDING HAITI

On January 1, 2004, Haitian Christians gathered to recognize the 200th anniversary of their nation, and pray for peace. In Boston, while Bishop O’Malley spoke in Creole before Haitian Catholics, Sol spoke to a large gathering of Protestants at the Haitian Baptist Church of New Jerusalem in Dorchester. Haitians in Boston were watching closely what was happening in Haiti. President Aristide was under fire and the resulting power struggle brought parts of Haiti under siege.

Despite the unrest, Sol made frequent trips to Haiti in the beginning of 2004. In January he spoke at the graduation of a Bible school. In February he joined a group from a Massachusetts suburban church, also accompanied by EGC President Doug Hall and his wife, Judy, to help with a building project for another church. Finally, on February 29, Aristide left Haiti and a new president took office.

In March, Sol was invited to join a group of selected pastors and lay leaders to meet the new cabinet ministers and interim president. “It was a wonderful experience to hear first-hand the concerns of the top leaders of the country,” Sol said.

This was a well organized event and a valuable time to connect with leaders. On the given day, we went to the National Palace and met with President Boniface Alexandre. Everybody introduced themselves. There was a formal speech by Dr. Romain (a church leader in Haiti) on behalf of the Protestant leaders. Then President Alexandre shared his view on the state of the country. He congratulated those of us from abroad for thinking of the motherland, and also clearly asked everyone to bring his share back to Haiti in efforts to renovate the country. We have already been doing that in many ways! We are just glad that he asked for it. We ended up praying with the President.

SEEK THE PEACE AND PROSPERITY OF THE CITY

The Haitians who emigrated to Boston throughout the 1970s and 1980s thought they came for a temporary stay. But as Haiti continued to struggle and the economic and political situation did not improve, they stayed on, much longer than they ever imagined they would.

In Jeremiah 29, God spoke to the exiled Israelites living in Babylon, whose bags were packed to return home, “Build houses and settle down… Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

The Haitian churches in Boston have matured under the seasoned leadership of dozens of networked, trained, and able pastors like Sol Védrine. Now there are, perhaps, the first glimpses of a move back to Haiti as Haitian churches in Boston are reaching back in greater numbers, creating working partnerships of love and support between churches in Boston and the homeland. “I am working with groups to help finish the construction of four churches in Haiti in strategic areas where they are most needed,” Sol says.

As they mature, Boston’s Haitian churches are becoming “sending churches,” providing a range of material and spiritual helps to Haiti, Sol observes. “People from our local Haitian churches seem to be receiving a kind of wake-up call. They are discovering that there is something they can do for the Lord.”

At 61, Rev. Dr. Soliny Védrine continues his role as a pastor to pastors, coordinating ministry among the churches not only in Boston, but across the Haitian Diaspora. As a new, seminary-trained leadership emerges from the churches, Sol is actively passing the torch on to others.

The story of the Haitian churches in Boston spans 35 years. The nation of Haiti spans 200 years. God’s work in building his Kingdom spans eternity. Sol keeps this long-term view in perspective as he dashes off to another meeting with yet another visiting pastor. “We are just passing by,” he says.

[published in Inside EGC, September-October, 2004]