Article Resources

Email this Article
Print Friendly Version
Respond to Article

When he told us that the future was a place that did not look like us, our Superintendent of schools unsettled the whole town. It was the 1970s and we were a plains community — 3,000 people largely the descendants of European immigrants. He said the future would look strangely like the past, when folks from the Balkans came to the plains with their families, farm methods and kolache recipes. And their mother tongues.

So he hired Spanish teachers for elementary school. He hired language teachers for middle and high school. Each day every student was to spend some time learning a second language.

After 20 years Superintendent Babiak has been proven right — the Hispanic world has come not just to Atlanta and Los Angeles, Chattanooga and Baltimore, but also to suburbia and small, rural towns. Already from Rochester, Mich., to Plano, Texas, Hispanic culture is a force in our communities. Will we ignore it? Will we embrace them?

In a January report about the faith of Hispanics, George Barna reports that in all our communities Hispanics are looking for a job, a church, a school, and a friend. They sometimes speak of the search in Spanish. Barna argues most Christians’ assumptions about that search are not very accurate. For example, Hispanics are much like other Americans in matters spiritual — they attend church and volunteer, says Barna. They pray and attend small-group meetings. The one thing Barna reports they don’t do as often as non-Hispanics is read the Bible. (See the report at www.barna.org)

How can we share our love of the Bible with this community? Could your congregation offer free English tutoring? Programs such as Let’s Start Talking, which teaches English using the Bible as a text,would be a great source of materials, training, and expertise for even the smallest congregations.

Some ministers are building bicultural models of ministry in which congregations commit to integrating all members into a single fabric. Our story on page 8 shows an Alabama church’s efforts to welcome diverse cultures into a single circle of worship. Some are using urban ministry models to reach urban Hispanics. In a summer issue we will be offering that model in a story about Los Angeles. How can you help?

However you go about it, the past is here again, as it were. Barna tells us the time is now because by the time we elect a new president in 2004 Hispanics will be the single largest ethic group in our nation. Too often congregations have put Hispanics in the ghetto of a segregated, single-language worship which supplements the English-language worship. My guess is that most congregations just haven’t mobilized to do anything more. A few are leading the way.

Only a few congregations may reason that ignoring these neighbors is easier than printing multi-lingual orders of worship or learning a few songs in Spanish as a welcome sign, as it were. My hunch is that most will want to make a genuine commitment to living in diverse communities of faith united at the foot of the Cross.

To those very few who do not, I would paraphrase a comment from a minister who in the 1960s condemned Christians who supported racial segregation. Today he might say, 'You tell Hispanics to go to heaven in the next life and you tell them to go to hell when they arrive at your worship service.'

Too strong, you say? How many resist making our congregations hospitable to Hispanics in the same ugly tone of some English-only initiatives?

Too strong, you say? How many think of Hispanics first as those who pick their peaches, mow their lawns or wash their cars and only later as those who might write a legal brief or preach a sermon?

The challenge is not for every church member to learn a second language, but for each of us to learn a first — the language of love. In this language, neither Hispanic nor Asian, dark nor light, rich nor poor, resident nor alien is excluded from worship which rises not as a babble but as a chorus.

CONTACT SCOTT LaMASCUS at scott.lamascus@oc.edu.