The Rise of Evangélicos
Elizabeth Dias ("Time," April 4, 2013)
One Sunday late last summer, I saw a sign on the side of the road in
Adelphi, Md. It was small, wedged between dozens of presidential campaign
signs,
and it was in Spanish: Iglesia de Dios del Evangelio Completo. Down the
road I found another sign: Primera Iglesia Bautista Hispana de Maryland. Soon
I started seeing signs for Protestant Latino churches everywhere. There was
even one right behind my apartment in Virginia. And so I decided to visit
two of the largest Latino Protestant churches in the area—La Roca de la
Eternidad in Adelphi and Iglesia Cuadrangular el Calvario in nearby Silver
Spring.
What I discovered signaled a Latino Reformation. Both churches were
doubling in size every few years. Many of the congregants were Catholic
converts,
and even more may have been undocumented. All were fervent believers—they
sang with hands high, danced during worship, and often brought their own
tambourines and flags to Sunday services. They were charismatic and believed
in miracles. They told me their stories over tamales and café con leche—how
they converted, how God healed their physical illnesses, and how their
churches became refuges from hunger and homelessness. To the mainstream
American culture, and even other white evangelical churches, they were
invisible.
But they were hiding in plain sight.
The story of both churches repeats itself across America .....Latino
evangelicals are one of the fastest growing segments of America’s churchgoing
millions. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than
two-thirds of the 52-million-plus Latinos in the US are Catholic; by 2030,
that percentage could be closer to half, and many are joining evangelical
Protestant ranks. It is difficult to track the numbers of the groundswell of
these new Protestants. They often meet in storefronts or living rooms, and
language barriers complicate the census process.
But there are also rising evangelical Latino megachurches. I met Pastor
Wilfredo De Jesús, who leads the 17,000-strong New Life Covenant Church in
Chicago. In 2000, just 100 people attended, and all were Spanish-speakers. Now
it is the largest Assemblies of God church in the nation. The church has
four campuses and nine of its 11 services are in English. Like the churches
in Maryland, New Life is charismatic, but it has crossed the great divide
into the American mainstream.
The rise of the Latino Protestants—the evangélicos, as they are called—is
a challenge for both the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist
Convention, the largest evangelical denomination in the US. Richard Land,
former president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission,
challenged his pastors four years ago to ignore the Latino reformation at
their
peril. “Because if you left [Washington, DC], and drove all the way to LA, and
you took the southern route, there wouldn’t be one town you’d pass that
doesn’t have a Baptist church with an iglesia bautista attached to it.”
Land estimates that 40 percent of Latino Southern Baptists are undocumented,
and that is something his brethren cannot ignore. “They came here to work, we
’re evangelistic, we shared the gospel with them, they became Baptist.”
Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback church in California and of Purpose
Driven Life fame, put the Latino church growth best. “The greatest growth of
all
is coming in the Pentecostal or charismatic churches,” he said. “It is
the untold story.”
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