Journey of faith takes many roads for new immigrants

Story by Ross Todd • Contributing writer
Illustration by Zeina Makky

When Gloria Pereida told her Catholic mother about her born-again experience, her mother broke into tears. “She couldn’t believe that I, too, just like my sister, was leaving the Church,” she said. Their family had always been Catholic, like the vast majority of her fellow Mexicans. “She said, ‘That’s not what I taught you.’ But I said, ‘You’re not responsible for us. We’re adults now.’”
Despite some unrest within her family, Gloria’s conversion to the Baptist faith has brought her an inner peace.
“It’s something you really can’t explain. No one will ever be able to explain such a feeling,” she said, sitting at her kitchen table. “It is the type of feeling that comes from heaven.”
Her two teenage sons, Omar and Chava, share her faith with enthusiasm and have even become youth leaders in the Pueblo de Dios congregation. But her husband, Fidencio Morales, still holds to his Catholic upbringing. And her eldest son, Luis Pereida, has become a Mormon.

Gloria Pereida “It's something you really can't explain. No one will ever be able to explain such a feeling. It is the type of feeling that comes from heaven.” Gloria Pereida On her conversion to the Baptist faith www.adelanteonline.com

Gloria’s story mirrors many of her generation. Even though Latin America has been a stronghold for the Catholic Church for nearly five centuries, evangelical churches such as the Church of the Nazarene and the Baptists are making an organized effort to reach out to Hispanics with leadership and resources.
At the same time, the Catholic Church has faced financial crisis in the wake of an economic downturn and child abuse scandals. Although Catholic laypeople and clergy are working at the grassroots level to provide social services and a church home to the influx of Latino Catholics, their resources lag behind those of their evangelical counterparts. More and more Latino Catholics are turning to evangelical churches for services, both social and spiritual.
The imbalance partially can be explained by the difference in religious makeup between Latin America and the United States. The Catholic Church is not the cultural and religious center in the United States that it is in Latin America, where more than 80 percent of the population professes to be Catholic. When immigrant Catholics turn to a church in America for solace and support, that church is much less likely to be Catholic than it is in their home country.

Evangelical Leaders Shepherd the Way
It’s Sunday morning at the Clark Christian Life Center behind the Church of the Nazarene in Mexico, Mo. Pastor Elpidio Sandoval stands on a platform playing a red-and-white electric guitar and singing into a microphone. The Christian, Mexican and U.S. flags keep watch at the pastor’s right. More than 20 Latino congregants join with him in worship, clapping hands and singing. The pastor’s wife, Elía, closes her eyes and raises her hands as she sings “Lord, I Lift Your Name on High” in Spanish.
The Sandovals were asked to come to Mexico, Mo., in January 2001 by the Anglo Nazarene congregation to minister to its growing Latino community. Elía Sandoval said the Latino community “wanted somebody who could preach for them, who was familiar with their language, culture and idiosyncrasies.”
The congregation in Mexico, Mo., is part of a growing movement in the Church of the Nazarene, which in 1997 declared the United States and Canada as “mission fields” for Hispanics. Roberto Hodgson, the Hispanic mission director for the United States and Canada, said the church is investing in leadership training and helping Latino pastors like Elpidio Sandoval start new congregations within the existing church structures. There are more than 17,000 Hispanic Nazarenes in 351 congregations. They range from autonomous Hispanic Latino churches to the congregation within a congregation in Mexico, the first Nazarene Hispanic ministry in Missouri. Hodgson says Latinos are bringing renewed sense of community and family to the denomination.

SARA FAJARDO/Adelante file photo Cristina Lara, 11, bows for a baptism in May 2003 at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Milan. Milan is one of several rural communities throughout Missouri that has established a flourishing Hispanic Catholic congregation. Others include Marshall, Jefferson City and Tipton.

The Southern Baptist Church, the nation’s second largest denomination, has had a presence in Missouri’s Latino population for more than 15 years. Mauricio Vargas, the Multicultural Catalytic Missionary for the Missouri Baptist Convention, has been serving the Latino community in Missouri since 1987. A native of El Salvador, Vargas was raised in the Baptist faith at a time when El Salvador was dominated by the Catholic Church.
“I remember being the only Baptist in elementary school and high school and college,” Vargas said.
Young Latino Baptists are not likely to be raised in the same situation today. Latino congregations in the Baptist church are growing rapidly, Vargas said.
Before Vargas arrived, Hispanic outreach in the state’s Baptist churches was virtually nonexistent. Now there are more than 40 Hispanic Baptist congregations throughout the state, most of which still worship in Anglo churches. In a denomination where much of the spending power is concentrated in the local church, the Missouri Baptists as a Convention spend almost $100,000 on training new Hispanic clergy. Most pastors, like the majority of Latino immigrants, are from Mexico and Central America.
“We really are investing,” Vargas said.
The Missouri Baptist Convention has established six Bible institutes throughout the state to help train Latino faith leaders. Seventy-nine people currently are enrolled in these institutes. Vargas said the goal is to have a Spanish-speaking pastor within a 30-minute drive of each group of Hispanic Baptists in the state.

Catholic Attempt to Respond to the Challenge
Alejandro Aguilera-Titus, associate director for the Secretariat of Hispanic Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the bishops have taken the Latino outreach efforts of other denominations as a challenge to increase their efforts. “It has been taken by the bishops as a wake-up call,” Aguilera-Titus said.
Aguilera-Titus said the number Catholic Latinos the Church has yet to reach is substantial.
“If we were to effectively welcome all the Hispanic Catholics we would not have enough parishes to house them,” said Aguilera-Titus.
Today roughly 25 percent of Catholic parishes, more than 4,000 churches, offer some sort of ministry to Latinos, ranging from masses in Spanish to comprehensive ministries that offer catecheses and Hispanic youth groups. However, these services are offered predominantly in the Southwest and California. Missouri towns with significant Hispanic populations like California and Mexico offer no Spanish masses and have no plans to do so. Others, like Marshall, are just beginning, despite nearly a decade-long Latino presence.
Latino outreach is especially vital to the future of the Catholic Church. Statistical analysis by the Church shows that by 2020, half of all US Catholics will be Latino.
But some concerned Catholics worry that the Church is not doing enough to meet They accounted for virtually all of the growth in the Catholic Church from 1990 to 2002. During that period almost 11 million Hispanics were added to the Catholic population in the U.S., offsetting the loss of 5.5 million white, non-Hispanic Catholics. the challenge. Hispanics are represented by only one Latino priest per 10,000 believers — compared to a one-to-2,000 ratio in the general population, according to a recent study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Hispanic advocates at the grassroots worry that the Church is not looking ahead.
“The folks are all out there waiting for help and I don’t see a lot of leadership from the bishops,” said Sister Joyce Schram, the newly hired Hispanic ministry coordinator for the Jefferson City diocese. “They seem to have their minds on other things these days.”
Ken Johnson-Mondragón is the director of research and publications for the Instituto Fe Y Vida, a Catholic organization that trains lay leaders in Hispanic youth and young adult ministry.
Growing numbers of Hispanics are leaving the church, Johnson-Mondragón said. In the 2002 Study, “The Status of Hispanic Youth and Young Adult Ministry In the United States,” the Instituto found a need for increased services for Latino young adults in the church, especially in the case of youth born in the United States. This group is especially at risk, the study found, because these youth are caught between two cultures, not necessarily able to feel at home in either. But in a time of budget crisis in the church, Johnson-Mondragón said many dioceses have combined the office of Hispanic ministries with other ministries.
“Lumped together with all other cultural groups when they represent 80 percent of the ethnic groups, they only get a portion of the pastoral attention” they need, he said.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace
When Maria Carpena moved to Jefferson City in 1999, there was no place in town for her to celebrate mass in Spanish. Carpena, a health program representative at the Office of Minority Health and Senior Services, made the 20-mile drive to California with her husband once a month to worship. At the time, the monthly mass offered at Annunciation Church was the nearest service offered in their native language.

Maria Carpena “For Latinos, we respect Mary a lot. She’s the mother of Jesus. If you don’t like her, you don’t have to disrespect her.” Maria Carpena Former convert to the Baptist Church www.adelanteonline.com

During that time, Carpena was invited by a friend to worship with the Spanish language congregation at First Baptist Church in Jefferson City. There she became active in the Bible study, memorized verses and took strength from the biblical story of David.
“I saw God can help even if you were small and from a different culture,” Carpena said.
Although she was still considered herself a Catholic, she had stopped celebrating Catholic holidays and praying the rosary.
But while she found comfort with her new Baptist congregation, she always tried to avoid conversations about the Virgin Mary. “For Latinos, we respect Mary a lot. She’s the mother of Jesus. If you don’t like her, you don’t have to disrespect her,” she said. Carpena reflects the profound sentiments of millions of Latinos when she defends her relationship with La Virgin:
“You don’t mess with your Mom,” Carpena said.
Aguilera-Titus sees the involvement of other denominations in Latino life as positive. Still, he sees a fine line between reaching out in good will and proselytizing.
“Some of the roughest criticism that a Catholic suffers at the hands of someone who is evangelical has to do with the sacraments and the devotions” to the saints and Mary, Aguilera-Titus said.
When St. Peter Catholic Church in Jefferson City started offering weekly Spanish masses in fall 2002, Carpena’s Catholic faith was reinvigorated. She began saying the rosary again and celebrating traditional Latino Catholic holidays.
“We do what we used to do in Mexico,” she said of her church community. “That makes a difference. It makes you feel more at home.”
Although Baptists do celebrate quinceañeras without dancing, holidays that are contradictory to Baptist theology like the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Day of the Dead are not celebrated.
“We use those opportunities to explain” the differences between the faiths, said Vargas. On the Day of the Dead, for example, Vargas said Baptists stress that Christians should rejoice because the dead in Christ shall one day rise.
Vargas acknowledges that some ministers have been confrontational on these matters. But in discussing the theological differences between Baptists and Catholics over Mary, Vargas takes a cautious approach where Latinos are concerned. “We Hispanics are very maternalistic, he said.” Although Baptists disagree with Catholics over Mary’s role in prayer, he said, all Christians can agree she is the mother of God.

Services — both Spiritual and Social
In spite of the Catholic Church’s recent efforts to reach out to Latinos, at a recent conference on Latino issues Sister Schramm said there’s still much to be done.
“It’s the seminarians who have to be learning Spanish — people want mass in Spanish because they only speak Spanish. These are mostly first generation folks,” she said.
Sitting in a conference room recently with about 12 Catholic activists, Schramm said, “We’re the troops — and we need more foot soldiers.”
Sister Schram also sees the social services Catholics provide as an integral part of the church’s mission. “I think it’s the message of Jesus who said help each other,” she said. “It’s just what the gospel said.” Two important services in Jefferson City, a traditionally Catholic stronghold, are funded through the diocese: El Puente and the Immigrant and Refugee Services, which provides legal counseling to immigrants throughout Central Missouri.
All the churches surveyed for this article are reaching out with a blend of spiritual guidance and social services.
“We are helping the community in anything we can,” Vargas said. That includes translating in the courts and hospitals, teaching English as a second language classes and meeting physical needs with food and clothing as well as starting Bible study groups.
“You might not see many Mexicans at the church, but that is because the church goes to their houses,” said Sra. Sandoval of the Church of the Nazarene in Mexico. “We are always on call, we go to the hospital, the shop, the laundromat, and we are the hand of God for whatever comes.”

The Writing on the Wall
A hand-written copy of the Ten Commandments bears witness to the hand of God in the household of Gloria Pereida. The framed commandments are close to the door to remind Gloria of God’s presence whenever she leaves her house. Even though Gloria does not share her faith with most members of her family, she still respects their beliefs.
“We don’t criticize anybody, no matter their religion,” she said. “We have to respect each other’s decision, because in order to be a good Christian, you have to first respect other people.”

Staff writers Marissa Cabrera and Julio Urdaneta contributed to this report.