August 19, 2002

CHILDREN toss bean bags through a target at the fiesta sponsored by First Baptist Church of Alamo and The Oaks Baptist Church.

Mary Hill Davis gifts spark state partnership
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___ALAMO--A North Texas Baptist church joined a small South Texas church in throwing a Tex-Mex-style block party for the whole community.
___About 70 volunteers from The Oaks Baptist Church recently traveled 500 miles from the suburbs of south Dallas County to a small community near Texas' southernmost tip. They came to help First Baptist Church of Alamo host a "fiesta de Jesuscristo" on the town plaza.
___"We probably could have had a small block party on the church parking lot, but we couldn't do something like this without The Oaks," said C.T. Cunningham, pastor of First Baptist Church in Alamo.
___The "party for Jesus" featured carnival-style games and free hot dogs, popcorn and sodas. Musical entertainment ranged from country ballads to Christian rap to Tejano-tinged Gospel. The evening ended with presentation of a film produced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
___Volunteers launched the fiesta at 6 p.m. Only a handful of children with their parents ventured out into the still-sweltering South Texas summer heat for the early part of the program.
___But after sundown, when Christian Tejano singer Johnny Gonzalez from First Baptist Church in Pharr took the stage, several hundred people were milling around the downtown streets.
___Five participants at the fiesta made professions of faith in Jesus Christ. And 471 area residents--none of them members of the church--completed registration cards. That borders on the miraculous in a community filled with undocumented workers who are reluctant to reveal names and addresses, according to Cunningham.
___"We have a follow-up committee who will make sure we visit or call on everyone who indicates an interest in the church," Cunningham said. "And we will send a letter to every participant."
___First Baptist Church is a smaller membership church--at least part of the year. This time of year, about 50 people attend Sunday School, and 75 worship there. But from mid-November to mid-March, when 300,000 Winter Texans come to the Rio Grande Valley, Sunday School attendance grows to 100 and worship attendance swells to 200.
___When the Winter Texans are in the Valley, the ethnic mix at First Baptist Church is roughly 80 percent Anglo and 20 percent Hispanic. Resident membership the rest of the year is closer to 60 percent Hispanic and 40 percent Anglo.
___In a community that is about 90 percent Hispanic, the church still doesn't reflect perfectly the town's ethnic make-up. But it's closer today that it was a few years ago, the pastor noted.
___"The church was an Anglo island in a sea of Hispanic people," said Cunningham, who was a member of Alamo's First Baptist Church for five years and an interim pastor for six months before the church called him as pastor in mid-May. A native of Muleshoe, he spent 25 years as a home missionary in Kansas and Nebraska, including 20 years as a church starter and five years in community ministries.
___Services at First Baptist Church still are conducted in English, but Spanish-speakers are able to listen to an interpreter on radio headsets in the sanctuary. And conversations in the church hallway are as likely to be in Spanish as in English.
___The fiesta was designed in part to communicate a message to everyone in Alamo that First Baptist Church cares about all its neighbors and wants to be ethnically inclusive.
___"We want people in the community to know we are interested in them," Cunningham said. "We have a reputation as an Anglo church. We want to get rid of that image."
___In addition to working at the fiesta, volunteers from The Oaks distributed about 500 English language Bibles and 500 Spanish language Bibles during their weekend in Alamo. "We reached about half the city," said Gene Key, minister of missions at The Oaks.
___Volunteers also built a storage building for the benevolence ministry at First Baptist Church, and they performed minor repairs and renovation at the church building and parsonage.
___"It's an encouragement to our people. They are excited and thrilled about the partnership with The Oaks," Cunningham said.
___The Oaks, formerly known as First Baptist Church of Oak Cliff, has been in the process of relocating from Duncanville to Grand Prairie, and the intergenerational mission trip to Alamo helped the church avoid becoming too inwardly focused, Pastor Bill White said.
___"We needed spiritually to see beyond" the relocation, White said. "We wanted to put our hearts into people, not just a structure. We needed the challenge of bringing this fiesta for Christ to this community."
___The Oaks Baptist Church is designated as a "key church" and has received financial support in the past for numerous church starts and other projects through the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions. Key churches are congregations that adopt a "missional" church strategy; that is, they focus on missions as the essential character of the church, permeating all its programs and ministries.
___Key churches typically employ a minister of missions like Key to coordinate the missional strategy.
___Key believes the fiesta model could work as an evangelistic tool during future mission trips, as the church continues its ongoing three-year partnership with First Baptist Church of Alamo.
___"I could see doing the same thing on a large scale in a football stadium and bringing in people from all over the Valley," he said. "And I can see doing it on a small scale in a colonia and drawing nearly everybody within walking distance."

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