A ‘muy buena’ church plant (reporting from Arlington, Texas): In the Dallas area, a Spanish-speaking congregation experiences growth and offers potential lessons for reaching the burgeoning Hispanic population.
ARLINGTON, Texas — In the heart of Dallas-Fort Worth, a growing Hispanic congregation celebrated two more baptisms on a recent Sunday.
Members sang the Spanish version of “This is the Day” as the Arlington Iglesia de Cristo (Church of Christ) welcomed a newly converted couple.
“Definitely, God is working,” said Jesús Rodriguez, a native Puerto Rican who moved from Arizona to Texas with his wife, Carmen, to help plant the church. “This is a great opportunity to explain the Gospel to many, many people.”
Two-and-a-half years after the congregation’s launch, weekly attendance tops 100.
Leaders of Texas-based Great Cities Missions — best known for recruiting and training missionaries for Latin America — see the Arlington church plant as a model for reaching Spanish speakers in the U.S.
“We want to see more churches planted by Hispanic teams in predominantly Hispanic communities in major U.S. urban centers,” said Scott Emery, a former missionary to Chile who is Great Cities Missions’ director of U.S. teams. “We are in need of good candidates for such teams and in need of partnering churches willing to support them.”
This story appears in the May 2015 print edition of The Christian Chronicle.
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