New Light Missionary Baptist gets new pastor

MOSES LAKE — Domingo Valenzuela fell in love with the West as a little boy growing up in Texas.

“Growing up as a little kid, we’d go to the movies, and we’d see the cowboy movies. I was always fascinated by the mountains, the valleys, the wide-open spaces,” he said.

“It was building over years and years. Go West.” Venezuela added.

It took a while, but the son of migrant farmworkers — who has done more than a little framework himself — made it out West.

And now he’s the new pastor at the tiny New Light Missionary Baptist Church in Moses Lake.

The 70-year-old Valenzuela is no stranger to Moses Lake, having lived here for more than 20 years beginning in 1987. Nor is he a stranger to pastoring, having preached his first sermon in 1974 and earned a degree from Hispanic Baptist Theological Seminary in San Antonio, Texas, in 1982, and pastoring a congregation in Sunnyside.

But his call to pastor the tiny congregation at New Light is something of a return to Moses Lake after being away for a few years.

“First, there’s my love for God. He called me to be a minister, and I do this out of love for him,” Valenzuela said. “I also love people. They are special. I don’t let background get in the way, I just see them as people.”

“If they were good enough for the Lord, they were good enough for me,” he said.

Valenzuela said he became a Baptist because when he was younger, they “were everywhere,” preaching to and visiting migrants like Valenzuela’s family where they lived and worked. “What got me attracted to the Baptists was accepting Christ as my personal Lord and savior,” Valenzuela said. “Before that, I thought that if I was a good guy, that would cover my sins.”

“I came to see that my good works are not good enough,” he said. “I decided to come to Christ, to receive him as lord of my life.”

The congregation he will now shepherd is tiny and struggling. They can’t pay him, but their modest little parsonage is now the home he shares with his wife of 46 years Mary Magda. But he’s hopeful about the church’s future.

“They have no resources, but I’m retired. Mostly I do it because I love the Lord,” he said. “Right now, we’re just getting started, and it’s mostly seniors. I’m one of the youngest and I’m 70!”

He hopes that preaching the gospel and loving neighbors will draw people.

“We stay basically with the word of God. We don’t preach a Baptist word, just the word of God,” he said. “God has the last word.”

New Light Missionary Baptist Church is located at 8791 Hillcrest Dr NE in Moses Lake. Sunday School begins at 10 a.m. and Worship at 11 a.m. For more information, contact (509) 762-6944.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.