Mission History
Augustinian Lutheran Church in Guatemala
The Iglesia Luterana Agustina de Guatemala (ILAG), founded in 1991, is a young church that has consciously chosen to accompany two of the population groups that were severely affected by Guatemala’s long civil war (1960-86). Its first three mission congregations were founded in marginal communities of the internally displaced who migrated from rural areas to the periphery of Guatemala City to escape the political violence, economic oppression and poverty caused by 36 years of civil war.
Since the 1996 peace accords, the ILAG has been starting new parishes among former refugees in Peten and in Quiche, with the indigenous people who fled to Mexico during the worst violence of the civil war in the early 1980’s, spent a decade or more in U.N.-sponsored refugee camps and eventually returned to Guatemala in organized blocks during the mid-1990’s.