After years of meeting in tents and temporary structures, the Alliance church in Guadalajara, Mexico, celebrated the inauguration of its first permanent building on 11 July 2026. The two-story facility, located in a region of central Mexico known as the "Circle of Silence" for its scarcity of gospel witnesses, represents a milestone in more than a decade of church planting by U.S. and Mexican Alliance leaders. The inauguration service was attended jointly by Alliance leaders from both countries, with Mexican Alliance President Juan Carlos Perales Sifuentes delivering the keynote sermon from Exodus 33, calling the congregation to pursue the same intimacy with God that sustained Moses in the wilderness.
The Circle of Silence is a region where gospel-advancing work faces opposition from drug cartels, hostility from the region's religious majority, and pressure from corrupt local authorities. Against this backdrop, longtime Alliance missionaries Bob and Cheryl Fugate have spent ten years planting churches, baptising new believers, and developing local pastors and ministry leaders. The new building—still awaiting some finishing touches including a staircase to the second-floor balcony—will eventually house classrooms for Sunday school and offices for ministry leaders overseeing church planting, pastoral training, and evangelism among the region's remaining unreached peoples.
Beyond the construction milestone, the article introduced two local leaders whose lives have been transformed through the Guadalajara church. Ivette, now an administrative worker and children's ministry trainer, first attended a Fugate-led service ten years ago during a season of family crisis and business collapse. "It was really what I needed at that moment," she said. Today she trains other Sunday school teachers. Angeles, abandoned by her second husband, found comfort through Cheryl Fugate's pastoral care and now leads "Circle of Hope," a weekly job skills training programme serving about ten women. The programme teaches jewellery making, haircutting, computer skills, and food preparation—offering women in vulnerable situations a path toward dignified work and, in some cases, an exit from abusive relationships. "I hope the congregation will continue to grow so that more people from my community will feel what a faith family is," Ivette said of the new building's future.
Source: Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA USA) — cmalliance.org/building-a-faith-family
