Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons:

But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness,

is accepted with him.

Acts 10:34f[1]

It was in 1994 that Dr. Donnie W. Smith, in his book, “The Undiscovered Harvest: Ministry to America’s Immigrant People,” related to us his experience with the Mountain View congregation in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Out of a multi-ethnic, pastoral ministry Smith alerted the Church of God in the United States to prepare itself for a great approaching harvest of immigrants. Sixteen years have passed since his call and the vital question is, “Are we prepared for the great harvest of immigrants?”

The best pastoral leaders have a capacity, almost extraordinary, to understand the contexts in which they serve and to benefit from the opportunities that are presented to them in their time. In the long run, the success of a pastor, man or woman, is not due only to the strength of one’s personality, nor to the amplitude and profundity of one’s skills. Without the ability to perceive and to adapt oneself to the changing conditions of the ministerial world, personality and skills are temporal strengths. An understanding of the Zeitgeist,[2] or the spirit of an epoch and it implications, has played a crucial, but unnoticed, roll in some of the greatest ministerial victories in all ages. In Christian history we have grand examples of men and women who knew how to interpret the Zeitgeist and to see great changes of transformation on the horizon. They were the ideal persons to promote the Kingdom of God in the most difficult of times. These persons not only were able to do good Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, but in addition, they knew how to interpret the times and the contexts of their mission in order to be relevant and pertinent to their epoch.

The concept, “spirit of an epoch,” may be intangible, but the risks of not being aware of the context are tangible. The “contextual intelligence” turned out to be crucial for the success of the Christian mission in the entire world. It is here that the necessity for an apostolic spirit (in the sense of opening new avenues of mission, to walk as Christ walked) arises with urgency in the United States of America. A real need exists in the Anglo-Saxon (English-speaking) church to recognize, to form and to facilitate the development of Hispanic and Anglo leaders who have the capacity, given by God, to seek and to guide an immigrant people, who need to experience the love of God, and the salvation that only Jesus Christ can offer.

One thing we know well, we cannot continue doing more of the same. If we do not change some of our customs, structures, our style of communication, mentality, personal and leadership preference, our sense of mission, vision and central values, we shall join the long lines of thousands of churches who do not find the road to the future and are destined to die (in the USA alone between 3,500 and 4,000 evangelical churches cease to exist each year).[3]

Today is the time to take a stand, today, not tomorrow. We must make the decisions that determine our direction and establish our sense of mission. In order to do this it is absolutely necessary to define our own identity, founded on a clear understanding that is historical, biblical, cultural, spiritual and missional.

It is important to note that the Gospel dignifies all cultures as vehicles of the revelation of God. Jesus made this clear in the Great Commission where he instructs the apostle to make disciples of all nations (Mt. 28:19). Paul also expressed it beautifully when he spoke of “God our Savior; who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:3-4). We must understand that the church exists for the mission and that the church that only looks within is not truly the church.

It is difficult to summarize the Hispanic reality in a couple of pages, due to its complexity and the diversity of these peoples. Lorenzo Albacete says that the Hispanic or the Latin in the US is a phenomenon of increasing importance. The community has had an enormous demographic and economic growth, but not near as much growth in the social and political dimensions.

Beginning with the demographic aspect, at present we are faced with a population of some 43 million Hispanics in the US. At the beginning of the seventies they represented 4% of the population; today, at 13% they are the largest minority, even above the African-Americans at 12.7%.  After Mexico, the US is the second largest Hispanic country in the world, even ahead of Colombia and Spain. There are those who project that there will be a population of 100 million Hispanics in the US by 2050.[4]

As to country of origin, the Mexicans are the majority (62% of the total), which leads certain scholars to speak of the mexicanization, rather than the latinization, of the US. Next in order come those from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Central America (especially El Salvador and Guatemala) and South America (Peru at the head, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile and others).

Another aspect of the demographics is the concentration of Latinos in certain parts of the US. Seventy-five percent (75%) reside in seven (7) states: California, Texas, Florida and New York are at the top of that list. In some cities fifty percent (50%) of the children are Hispanics. Due to historical reasons and geographical proximity, Hispanics of a certain national origin predominate in certain states: e.g., Cubans in Florida, Mexicans in California and Texas, etc. In the area of New York, as in many other aspects, the situation is different, since immigrants from all parts of the world concentrate there. This is a great experiment and it remains to be seen how the Hispanic community will develop in the future as it continues to grow in size and diversity.[5]

In the light of all this it is important to develop more intentional strategies for the purpose of reaching the Hispanic communities that use English as their principal language.

May I be permitted to suggest to our Anglo churches five important keys for connection with the Spanish harvest.

KEY 1

The Pastor and the local church

must want to reach the Hispanic people.

Without a commitment, in both its passion and its intentionality, the church will find itself limited in any attempt to start a ministry to the Hispanic community. It was in 1983 that Allan McGray, pastor of the Church of God in Baldwin Park, CA, invited me to be part of his pastoral team and in this way to focus the church in its ministry to reach the whole community, which at that time was over 80% Hispanic. As the Hispanic pastor I felt valued, respected and part of the whole work team. In a short time the Latinos reached a sizeable group and became an important missional force for the church.

Key 2

The Pastor and the local church must offer

an incarnational, apostolic and transforming Ministry

First, a ministry in touch with the present time and context must be incarnational. This means that the church must assume forms and use methods that are relevant and pertinent to the society and culture that it wishes to reach. The Church of God should challenge, critically, all of the socio-cultural expressions, but at the same time, in a creative form, it should use them in order to focus the lives of the persons in all their areas. There is always the fear that this other culture may be able to affect our culture in a negative way. But in general the opposite happens. There are very important values in the Hispanic culture that would contribute to the life of our church. An outstanding example of this is the value Hispanic people put on the family and interpersonal relations.

Second, the Church of God should have an empowering, apostolic ministry. This means that the Church should fulfill its ministry to challenge the powers of this world that maintain people in captivity (1 Thes 1:4, 5), marginalized and full of fear. The immigrants are people open to the gospel, but very vulnerable. It is these new peoples that can bring renewed life and energy to our church.

Third, the Church of God should fulfill an apostolic ministry of transformation. This means that the church should penetrate and seek to renew the social and political structures that tend to dehumanize people, and at the same time to create liberating and humanizing conditions for those who are weary and heaven laden.[6] There is much that we as a church can do to serve, to protect and to make it possible for immigrants to find a place in the society and in the heart of our community of faith.

Key 3

The Church of God is and should operate as

a Pentecostal, Charismatic Community.

The Spirit of the living Christ that dwells in body of Christ bears within itself all those gifts that are required for the life and mission of the body. The church is a charismatic community in relation to its mission and ministry, its life and vocation. It is only when the community of faith responds faithfully to its nature and origin, that it has the power to transform life, giving it direction and energy, and thus passing its experience from one generation to another and from one tradition to another. In other words our own nature and sense of mission as a Pentecostal church provides us with the elements necessary to make connections with other cultures. If we are Pentecostal, we should learn to live and to value unity in diversity.

Key 4

The Church of God should give its ministers

relevant ministerial formation.

All of the churches, denominations and other Christian institutions around the world are experimenting drastic changes in their operational modalities for the way they plant churches and carry out their missionary activity, as well as in their formation of leadership, their administrative models, their social action and service and their public presence.

Today, more than ever, the need of the hour demands a rapprochement of our traditional centers of theological education (Anglos) with the Hispanic churches in order to understand the needs and in a creative manner to generate a master plan that guarantees the theological formation of thousands of ministers who at present have no access to theological preparation for ministry.

This will demand the creation of Hispanic theological centers, the hiring of Hispanic scholars, the setting up of libraries with resources in Spanish, special scholarships for the Hispanic population, and programs based in consortia and strategic alliances with other like-minded seminaries and universities.

  • We could request flexibility from the associations of accreditation as we request recognition of creative programs, which, although diverse and methodologically distinct, provide the Hispanic human resources needed to complete the task.
  • We could establish programs of acculturation for the students of Latin America who terminate their programs in the Latin America seminaries and wish to serve in the North American context.
  • We could negotiate strategic agreement between Christian universities and theological seminaries in the US with their counterparts in Latin America.

Since education is extremely expensive in this country, we must discover forms of cooperation with the centers of formation outside the US. Today the key words and phrases are: collaboration, cooperation, networking, teamwork, synergy, innovation, and creativity, to mention only a few. The Church of God at the international level has sufficient human resources to collaborate with the parallel personnel in the US. We have a global network; the only thing lacking is that we use it.

At the time we communicate the Gospel, we must be prophetic, as we challenge the values of the society that lead to a society to alienation, oppression and social crime. On other occasions we will be called to invest the rest of our life, with a sincere compassion to respond to the needs of the poor, the immigrants, the orphans, the broken families, the children at risk, the adolescents, and the elderly—and to all those around us.

Key 5

The Church of God should cultivate a

Worship that is friendly to the Hispanic

We need to become a community of worship, of truth, of love, of service, and above all, we must become a community of hope. The image that we generally have of the church is that of a pastor looking out at his flock and of the congregation looking back at their pastor, and both of them with their backs to the community around them. Today we must lift up our eyes and look where Jesus looked, at the city, at the people, at those on the outside, at the immigrants and the foreigners, at the lost, and at those who have no hope. For this purpose we must make radical liturgical and missional changes in order to reach those who have not been reached.

For each of the target groups that we wish to reach, we need to incorporate something of their own folkloric expression, whether it be language, music, symbols, style or what they consider beautiful. It is clear that the church service of today is not just diverse, but heterogeneous; it is a flowing together of cultures and traditions. In fact, we are in the presence of multi-cultural liturgies (orders of worship) in which there are an interchange between what is foreign and what is local, what is traditional and what is modern. It is important to continue stimulating these interchanges and the cultural assimilations that affirm the universality of the Christian liturgy.

We could improve the quality of the liturgical services by using persons in relation to their personal competencies and their spiritual gifts. Music also is an instrument of mission. We must find appropriate moments where and when to invite the membership to gather around the Lord’s Table. The majority of the Hispanics come from a Roman Catholic religious background, where the centrality of the service is the Eucharist. The Lord’s Supper has a natural attraction and is a fundamental point of contact with Hispanic spirituality.

The Church of God has a center of Hispanic resources and ministry in the international offices. For more information you can contact Dr. Fidencio Burgueño: www.ministerioshispanosidd.com or by telephone (1-800-452-2441).

[1] KJ; the Spanish text says, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in whatever nation, whoever fears Him and does what is right (just) is pleasing to Him.”

[2] Zeitgeist is a German word, used to speak of “the spirit (Geist) of the time (Zeit)” and to refer to the intellectual and cultural climate of that era.  (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist).

[3] Randy W. Bright,, www.churcharchitect.net/1082003.htm. 2008.

[4] Primer Encuentro de la Fundación Consejo España EE-UU. La Comunidad Hispana en los EEUU. February, 2007,  p. 1.

[5] Ibid., p. 2.

[6] Ibid., p. 155.

Dr. David E. Ramirez

Field Director to South America

Church of God World Missions