Tag Archives: church growth

We’ve got to go bilingual…

church buildingIt’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.

What would you give up to see the Kingdom grow?

 

Worship at a congregation in Matanzas

Worship at a congregation in Matanzas

All right, it’s time to get this blog started again. My planned post about Christmas seems a little out of place now, so we’ll move on to another topic. How about a thought question? If you had to choose, would you opt to live in a country where you could practice your religion comfortably or live in a place where the church was growing by leaps and bounds?

Now don’t jump to conclusions, I’m not saying that everyone everywhere has to choose between those two. I was thinking about my friends in Matanzas, Cuba. In a lot of ways, their lives are nothing to envy. Many of them live in poverty. They don’t enjoy many of the freedoms we do. Opportunities for the future are limited. But on any given Sunday, they baptize 4-5 people at church. Over the last few years, the main congregation in the city of Matanzas has started 19 churches and has averaged 200 or so baptisms.

Would it be worth it to you? Would you give up personal comfort, civil rights, etc. for a chance to live in a place where the Kingdom is growing rapidly?