October 30, 2000

CELL GROUPS have enabled Primera Iglesia Bautista in Piedras Negras, Mexico, to grow from 100 to 900 members in five years, Pastor Israel Rodriguez tells participants in a River Ministry tour as Jack Calk, director of missions for Del Rio-Uvalde Baptist Association, interprets. (Photo Rex Campbell)

Ministry makes Rio Grande river of love
___By Marv Knox
___Editor
___Life is different on The River.
___Not necessarily the Amazon, Nile, Danube, Ganges or Yangtze. Not even the Mississippi.
___Life is different on the Rio Grande, the 1,254-mile border that meanders between Texas

How to get involved For more information about River Ministry, call Dexton Shores at (214) 828-5246 or (888) 333-2363, write to him at 333 North Washington, Dallas 75246-1798, or visit the River Ministry website at www.bgct.org/ river_ministry.

and Mexico.
___Life is different today than it was yesterday, than it will be tomorrow. It's different from one point on the Rio Grande to the next. It's especially different from any other place in Texas or Mexico.
___For millennia, the river has meant life. Today, the Rio Grande means change.
___And people along the borderland on both sides of the Rio Grande are receiving help in coping with escalating change through River Ministry, a program of spiritual and physical assistance provided by the Baptist General Convention of Texas and hundreds of supporting churches.
___River Ministry has been in place 33 years. Its ministries include:
___ At least 993 Baptist churches that have been started on both sides of the Rio Grande.
___ Seventy medical clinics built by River Ministry volunteers. The clinics serve more than 40,000 patients annually.
___ Ten children's homes, which minister to more than 600 destitute children each year.
___ Seventeen theological training institutes that equip borderland ministers.
___ A missionary training center established to teach Hispanic Baptists to share the gospel in Mexico and abroad.
___Those developments provide ministry up and down the Rio Grande, noted Dexton

WORKERS BOIL candelilla plants to make wax and earn $2 per day south of the Rio Grande in Mexico.

Shores, director of River Ministry. But in the past five years, the pace of change has quickened, and the needs have begun to escalate, he told a group of Texas Baptist missions leaders as they toured roughly half the borderland, from Eagle Pass to El Paso.
___The key catalyst of change has been NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Agreement--which was implemented Jan. 1, 1994, Shores noted.
___NAFTA opened up the Mexico-Texas border to an unprecedented commercial/industrial boom, he said. Since 1996, at least 103 of the Fortune 500 companies have moved part of their operations to the border. Most of them opened "twin plants," low-cost/high-volume manufacturing facilities just south of the Rio Grande. Typically, the plants are located in a Mexican "twin city," immediately across the river from a Texas city.
___This growth has created a population explosion along the river. Four of Texas' five fastest-growing cities are on the border--Laredo, Brownsville, McAllen and El Paso. And that's only part of the story, reported Shores, who cited even faster growth on the Mexican side. For example, more than 1,000 new immigrants move to Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, every week. More than 1,500 arrive in Juarez, across from El Paso, every day.
___Today, about 14 million people live along the borderland, with about 10 million of them south of the Rio Grande. By 2020, that number is expected to grow to 36 million, with 30 million of them on the Mexico side.
___According to U.S. Census statistics, the net growth of population along the river in Texas will be larger than the population of 12 U.S. states.
___In the booming border cities, newly arrived residents must cope with monumental change, Shores noted. Hundreds, if not thousands, of industrial managers have moved from all over the United States, Canada and abroad to the Texas cities to manage factories just across the Rio Grande. They are learning to cope with a new region, new peoples, unique culture.
___Their learning curve pales in comparison to the plant workers, mostly illiterate peasants, who move from the rural interior of Mexico to the large cities, hoping for steady jobs and improved living conditions.
___But life along the river is different from one point to the next, as well. Near the twin cities, the people crowd into colonias--unincorporated villages, many without basic utilities. There, they often begin building tiny homes with wooden pallets and tarpaper on 20- by 70-foot lots. To outsiders, their living conditions look like direst poverty. To them, it's an improvement.
___Life in the cities and colonias contrasts sharply from life in the ejidos, villages in the Big Bend area, where 100 to 200 scattered people cling to the desert many miles from the nearest paved road and telephone. Out in the country, borderlanders subsist on meager trimmings from the land and $2 per day in income they make from boiling down candelilla plants to make wax for candles.
___In the urban colonias, the poverty is present, but life is modern. Even the poorest colonias feature markets, most of the adults work in new factories, and life is on an upward

TRAFFIC clogs the streets leading to border crossings up and down the Rio Grande, particularly since the North American Free Trade Agreement opened the border to industry.

curve. But in the desert, the people live much like their ancestors lived generations ago.
___Life along the river also is strikingly different from life in the interior of either Texas or Mexico.
___The 43-county Texas border region is the national leader in the poverty rate (about 30 percent), schoolchildren in poverty (38 percent), unemployment (9 percent), birth rate (21 live births per 1,000 population) and percent of population that speaks Spanish at home (57 percent). It ranks last in the United States in per capita income.
___Conversely, the booming border is the wealthiest region of Mexico. As poor as factory workers in the colonias may seem, they enjoy much higher incomes than the relatives they left behind in the interior and in the south of Mexico.
___From a religious perspective, the borderland is different too, Shores noted. On the Texas side, residents are much less likely to be Baptists than in the rest of the state, often known as the Baptist Buckle of the Bible Belt. On the Mexico side, the newcomers are much more open to the gospel than residents of the interior and the south, the least-evangelized areas of Mexico.
___This particularly is good news, Shores said, because in the next 15 to 20 years, one-fourth of the Mexican population is expected to be living in the borderland. "Those who have had the least access to the gospel are arriving daily by the thousands at our back door and present us, as Great Commission churches, with the most challenging opportunity ever."
___In this context, River Ministry works alongside the six Texas Baptist borderland associations and seven Mexico Baptist regional conventions to do what needs to be done in order to spread the gospel and meet human needs.
___Working with the associations on both sides of the border, River Ministry helps coordinate the work of more than 8,000 volunteers from 900 churches who come to the borderland to minister every year.
___Along the border, one ministry can lead to another. For example, 69 churches were started in the first three months of this year. Most of them gained a foothold in their communities through healthcare, Shores said.
___Still, there is only one Baptist church for every 67,000 people on the Mexico side of the border, he noted, urging Texas Baptist support for church-starting and related ministries.
___"All is done so that they may know Jesus as Lord and Savior," he explained.
___But River Ministry's efforts are designed to be given away to the churches and the Baptists in the borderland, he added. "Our intention always is to work ourselves out of a job. We want to empower and release folks along the border, to allow local leaders to direct the ministries."
___For example, a Texas church might partner with a Mexican church for two or three years, either to help the borderland church grow and strengthen its ministries or to help a new church get started, he said. But after that time, the Texas church should be prepared to move on to another church, allowing the Mexican church to stand on its own feet.
___"We don't want to create dependency," Shores stressed. "We want to meet spiritual needs and equip local leaders to multiply themselves over and over.
___"We partner with groups and do what they say needs to be done. We meet indigenous, local needs. We're not interested in constructing fine buildings they can't maintain or creating budgets they can't meet. We have to work on an appropriate scale, and we have to continually be working ourselves out of a job."
___The size of volunteer groups can vary, he said. Some projects might involve relatively large numbers of volunteers, such as a medical/dental group with workers who also help conduct Vacation Bible Schools in colonias. But other projects, particularly in the rural areas of the desert, might be scaled to a small number of volunteers with specific skills, such as agriculture, well-drilling or construction.
___Shores and River Ministry associational directors of missions increasingly are requesting that Texas Anglo congregations team up with Texas Hispanic congregations for volunteer projects. This particularly would be helpful, because the Hispanic Texas Baptists can provide fluency in the Spanish language for the entire team.
___

HOMES in border colonias often begin as shanties built with wooden pallets and tarpaper.

____

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