April 28, 1999
Hispanic pastors pledge
to start 117 new congregations
___By Dan Martin
___Texas Baptist Communications
___HOUSTON--Hispanic pastors from across Texas pledged to start 117 new Hispanic Baptist congregations during a rally this month in Houston.
___Otto Arango, pastor of Iglesia Bautista Gethsemane in McAllen, met with a number of other Hispanic pastors last October.
___"We decided it would be a very good idea to work in all of the areas of our state to motivate our Hispanic Baptist pastors to cometo a rally where we would pledge to start new congregations," Arango said.
AARON DE LA TORRE, pastor of Iglesia Bautista La Comunidad in Hidalgo, shows E.B. Brooks (left) and David Guel plans for a building to house his new congregation. De La Torre started with a dozen people early this year, and by April reached 200 in attendance. Brooks is head of the Church Starting Center of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, and Guel is South Texas consultant for the CSC.
___The basic idea for the new church-starting effort was cooperative, Arango said, and he listed key workers in the effort as Rolando Lopez of Northwest Hispanic Church in San Antonio, Pete Castro of Iglesia Bautista Calvario in Corpus Christi, David Galvan of Primera Nueva Vida Iglesia Bautista in Garland, Daniel Sanchez of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Jose Vasquez of Primera Iglesia Bautista in Gainesville and Jose Eusebio Alfaro of Iglesia Bautista Nuevo Amanecer in Cleburne.
___Part of the strategy is to find prospective pastors and then to establish a training center at each of the churches where the church planter can be trained while starting a church.
___"Currently we have 42 training centers with more than 1,200 students enrolled," Arango said. "About a year and a half ago, we developed material which would allow churches to train their laymen at the entry level to do basic church planting," he continued, adding that many of the students are attending the classes while doing on-the-field work planting new congregations.
___David Guel of Corpus Christi, South Texas consultant with theChurch Starting Center of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, said Hispanic new church starts have "accelerated in recent years."
___"In 1994, Texas Baptists stared 51 new Hispanic churches. In 1998, four years later, there were 125 new church starts, and we were preparing for 200 in 1999 before this effort was launched. Now, we may have many, many more than 200," Guel said.
___At the rally, Robert Arrubla Jr., pastor of El Buen Pastor Baptist Church in Fort Worth, pledged to start four new congregations in Fort Worth.
___"I just finished training seven laymen to be church starters," he said. "At Easter, each of them preached on one of the seven last words of Christ, and now they will each preach one Sunday night before going out to start a congregation."
___Arango credited Guel with building awareness in Hispanic churches to start new churches.
___"It once was that Anglo churches started Hispanic missions, but now Hispanic churches are seeing the need and starting Hispanic missions," said Arango, who has started 31 missions in McAllen in the past three years.
___Lopez congratulated the people at the Houston meeting as being "people who have caught a vision."
___Lopez, who served with the task force which wrote the Baptist General Convention of Texas Vision 2000 statement on reaching Hispanics for Christ from 1992 to 2000, said the original goal was to start 600 churches in the eight-year period.
___"We have passed that goal already," he said. "The vision continues to be alive. We thank God for what he has allowed us to do."
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