October 30, 2000

DUSTY COLONIAS, unincorporated villages that may include from a few homes to thousands, ring El Paso and Juarez, Mexico, where 1,500 new residents arrive daily. Baptists are discovering strong response to the gospel message preached and delivered in the booming colonias.

El Paso Baptists reach across
border to assist Mexican churches
___By Marv Knox
___Editor
___EL PASO--If you want to see the future of Texas, watch El Paso today.
___The Lone Star State's westernmost city also is one of its most rapidly growing, culturally diverse, fast-changing and, some would say, dynamically vibrant.
___"You better take a good look at El Paso, because all of Texas is going to look like it, and it won't take that long," advised Levi Price, pastor of First Baptist Church.
___El Paso's population is about 750,000, but when its sister city, Juarez, which sprawls just across the sliver of the Rio Grande, is added, the metropolitan population pushes 3 million.
___El Paso is 75 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Protestant and only 1 percent Baptist, Price reported. More than 200,000 residents are not affiliated with any church.
___"Twin plants"--a massive range of factories, called "maquiladoras" in Spanish, on the Juarez side of the river--stoke the economy, drawing about 1,500 additional Mexican workers to the region every day and attracting skilled industrial managers from all over the United States.
___The managers populate the fashionable neighborhoods of El Paso. The factory workers live in colonias, unincorporated villages without utilities that may number from 15 homes to thousands, which ring the area.
___El Paso/Juarez is one of the world's largest borderplexes--a metropolitan complex of cities that span an international order.
___Like cities up and down the Mexico/Texas border, El Paso/Juarez boomed following the 1994 implementation of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which opened wide the border to commerce and industry.
___The sheer numbers illustrating that impact are staggering. For example, in just one month, almost 4.4 million people and 1.4 million vehicles cross the border from Juarez into El Paso.
___El Paso Baptist Association and two sister organizations south of the border, the North Chihuahua Regional Baptist Convention and the Juarez Valley Regional Baptist Convention, work individually and together to cope with the changes and spread the gospel to the vast river of incoming people.
___A tour of churches in both El Paso and Juarez is at once intensely stimulating and profoundly numbing. The possibilities seem limitless and the challenges feel monumental.
___"People in this area are open to the gospel," reported Leo Samaniego, River Ministry Coordinator for El Paso/Juarez. "You meet their needs and they see you're sincere, and they will accept the gospel."
___Both Mexican and Texas churches are working determinedly to do just that.
___They're preaching the gospel in all the languages of the people. They're also putting feet to the gospel, meeting human needs in the inner city and the rural colonias. They're helping suburban parents raise their children and trying to help people whose lives have been turned upside down by change understand the love of Christ is never changing.
___Churches range from well-off urban and suburban congregations meeting in brick edifices, to storefront churches accessible to low-income neighborhoods, to new congregations still meeting in suburban school buildings, to house churches in colonias so new that many people still find shelter from the elements behind cardboard and tar paper. Some pastors are seminary trained; others barely are literate.
___Despite their diversity, their needs sound repetitively similar--creativity to handle the changing environment, workers to meet the needs of their communities, space for growing congregations, resources to provide the space or upgrade the facilities or supply the ministries, energy to keep on keeping on.
___Lorenzo Pena, El Paso Baptist Association's director of missions, believes churches provide the key for reaching El Paso/Juarez--and by implication the rest of Texas and northern Mexico--by being used of God to transform lives.
___Three strategies are vital to equip the churches to reach their communities and saturate the region with the gospel, he said.
___"First, we need a prayer focus that transcends borders," he noted. The transforming power of God is available to Christians, he added. "It's happening in our churches and in other evangelical churches."
___"We also need to develop indigenous leadership," he said, calling for the training of ministers and lay leadership out of the context in which they live and worship to serve the people in their own communities and neighborhoods.
___"We cannot leave that responsibility for anybody else. We cannot depend on others for ultimately being responsible," he said.
___"We must prepare leadership for their own ... context."
___"Third, we must continually emphasize that we serve every church that we work with--regardless of size or money or status, so that each church can serve God's vision in that community.
___"We can't do their work for them, but we can facilitate, guide and coach them."
___The implications of achieving these strategies are significant for all Texas Baptists, Price noted. For as goes El Paso, so will go Texas.
___

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