It’s a firm conviction of mine that the only way churches in places like Texas will be able to really serve their communities in the future is for them to be bilingual. Not necessarily having bilingual services (I’ll talk about that in a minute), but being bilingual.
Why not just plant more Hispanic churches? That works well with an immigrant population, but over time Hispanic families want to be a part of “regular” society. Typically you have one generation that barely speaks English, their kids that are functionally bilingual, and the third generation that might understand some Spanish, but no longer speaks it. 60% of Hispanics in the United States were born in the U.S.; 60% of those consider English to be their primary language. Eventually, even Hispanic churches have to go bilingual, or they will lose their youth.
I’m convinced that Anglo churches need to be preparing themselves to go bilingual as well. That may mean holding a separate bilingual service. There is a church in Escondido that has “separate but equal” congregations of Hispanics and Anglos; they have separate auditoriums and say that the Hispanic auditorium is actually the nicer of the two. Or congregations can go the way that the Stockdale congregation has gone, being bilingual. [Another example is the Inland Valley congregation near Los Angeles which does EVERYTHING bilingually, including singing every song in two languages simultaneously]
In a future post, I’ll share my opinions about how we go about preparing ourselves to be bilingual.
I did want to tell you about last Sunday, since I had requested that you be praying. Thanks to the prayers of many, the combined bilingual service with the whole church was a very edifying time. I’ve heard no negative comments (though I don’t know that anyone would have shared those with me).