By Dr. Gus Reyes
Editor's Note: The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, a Sacred Sector partner, has a long history of facilitating empowerment of Hispanic faith communities. In this two-part series Dr. Gus Reyes shares with Sacred Sector’s director Chelsea Langston Bombino about how Hispanic faith-based organizations and congregations are navigating the interconnected social, cultural and public policy challenges in this moment presented by both COVID-19 and recent incidents of racial violence.
In part one of this two part series, I explored how, for Hispanic faith-based organizations, there is a shared understanding and acceptance that ministry outreach to the community is an integral part of how we worship God. This understanding is shaped and undergirded by Hispanic congregations’ theological orientation to each other and their larger communities through the lense of familial relationships. In this article, I will take up this theological notion of la familia as a unifying them in our common faith walks, and apply it to how our Hispanic faith communities are living into their spiritual commitments around civic engagement during the dual challenges of a global pandemic and heightening tensions around the pursuit of racial justice.
Hispanic Communities and a Faith-Framework for Civic Engagement
It is true that there have been many innovations recently in Hispanic ministries in terms of adopting organizational practices in light of COVID-19. However, there have also been barriers for our Hispanic congregations that impact how they exercise their religious freedom in this moment, with respect to both COVID-19, and with respect to the racial justice conversations we are engaging in right now. For Hispanic faith communities, these are not two separate categories. They are connected, in that they both directly impact our people and families. Hispanic congregations in this moment really need to understand and internalize a faith framework for civic engagement. Some of our Hispanic churches’ members come from Latin American countries in which government corruption and state-sponsored injustice are normal practices, rather than exceptions to the rule. As a result, they have not inherited a comprehensive theology of civic engagement and are predisposed to fear, and to refrain from, public engagement altogether. In a recent conversation, one Hispanic faith-based leader stated: “We identify with Christ, as he was often the stranger, the religious other, the servant. We come to our civic engagement with servants’ hearts, seeking the good of all, and especially the poor, but we don’t have the tools to incarnate our beliefs in our congregations and ministries, and we are hesitant to participate in the public square.”
It is true that there is a lack of formal academic sociological research on how social and legal landscapes impact Hispanic churches and ministries, especially how they engage civically. We know it to be true that Hispanic congregations are focused on serving their communities as an integral part of the life of their congregations, and yet there are limited research studies that confirm what we know to be true from our lived experiences. This lack of research is one of the reasons NHCLC is so passionate about investing in Hispanic higher education, including through the doctoral level. We need Hispanic Christian academics who know both the academic context, and the context in which Hispanic churches operate, to be able to add to this growing body of research and shape better understandings of the importance of the Hispanic faith community’s civic engagement. We believe that the lack of formal research on how Hispanic faith communities are impacted by their social and public policy contexts is actually a marker of inequity in our communities. ¹
Co-laborers in Building Capacity for Public Engagement
To address the most pressing cultural and public policy shifts facing Hispanic congregations today, Hispanic church leaders identify the need for tools for civic engagement and participation in the public square. Texas Baptists and San Antonio Baptist Association partnered with CPJ’s Sacred Sector earlier this year to launch a learning community for over 30 faith-based Hispanic leaders and their ministries. In the Hispanic community, learning is at the center of any community, and mutuality is central. Through this partnership, we learned about how Hispanic congregations have so many spiritual strengths that undergird how they approach challenging and changing social and political landscapes. One Hispanic congregational leader shared, “Sacred Sector’s partnership with our Hispanic congregations empowers them to apply their faith to how they engage in the public square, through service and through civic actions.”Another participant stated: “I think this learning community has helped us understand how we can maintain our Christian identity in the midst of a changing public square. We grew our capacity in understanding faith-centered employee practices, and how we can engage government without sacrificing our faith identity. I think we need to think about how we expand our faith-based service in the public square.”
For Hispanic churches to remain vital, there needs to be a greater capacity for cultural competency and faith-shaped civic literacy that we are also working on. One ministry leader in a Hispanic congregation recently shared: “There are many social, economic and public policy factors impacting our population of faith leaders. We believe healthy congregations can use their theological traditions and practices to integrate a faithful response to move forward.” The theological theme of family,for Hispanic pastors and church leaders has to be incarnated in how we relate to community outreach and civic life. One leader stated that pastors and Hispanic ministerial leaders need to learn from each other in a continuous, open and searching process as they live out their faith through their worship activities and throughout their community and civic engagement: “We learn best through engaging with each other interactively, through discussion and working together, to clarify our faith-based missions and how we carry them out.” Hispanic leaders of faith view their other Hispanic ministries and their leaders as co-laborers, mutually molding and in the process being molded more into the image of God.
Variance within Hispanic Congregation’s Civic Engagement Response to Racial Justice
We must work together to build the capacity of our congregations so that we can help our neighborhoods reach their full potential. This is especially true especially in this moment of the calls for racial justice. How can Hispanic congregations engage in pursuing justice for their communities, while recognizing the diversity within the Hispanic faith community itself? Of course, we can pray. [We can] pray for the young man who was hit with a rubber bullet in Austin because he witnessed a protest. But our faith calls us to pray with our service and our advocacy, too. A lot of Hispanic faith communities feel uneasy because they feel like they are on the receiving end of injustice and police brutality and systemic racism, but they are not necessarily being fully included in public discussions about systemic racism. Note that in our Hispanic communities, many races and ethnicities are represented. Some Hispanic people would be perceived as black. Some have European roots. Some have Native American heritage. Many or most of us have represented a mixture of racial, ethnic and/or national origin backgrounds. It is not simple for the Hispanic faith community to respond to the current moment with respect to racial justice with one voice, given the spiritual and cultural variance in our own communities.
Many Hispanic congregations are still cultivating a theological framework that shapes their civic engagement overall, let alone on a sensitive issue like racial equity. Hispanic faith leaders see they have a role to play in shepherding their co-religionists’ understanding of the importance of speaking and acting thoughtfully in the public square. And yet, it is not easy to show Hispanic Christians one definitive way to carry out the Lamb’s image in this nuanced moment. For some, civic engagement may look like finding one or two issues at the local government level that they can meaningfully engage in with a public official. For others, it may mean encouraging voter registration, exploring serving as a volunteer commissioner at the municipal or county level, or simply starting with praying for our public leaders. I do believe the Hispanic faith community can harness their sacred values around familia to engage in answering the question: “how do I love my neighbor, like I love my own family, through how I engage in political community?”
Hispanic Congregation’s Civic Engagement During COVID-19
Civic engagement in this moment is also a matter of navigating the systems of public policy, on a state and federal level, set up to sustain not just individuals, but institutions such as families and ministries, through the COVID-19 pandemic. Hispanic faith-based organizations are not necessarily equipped to know how to navigate government processes and they have cultural concerns about applying for any type of government assistance. We know that some congregations and even state-based congregational networks have had to lay people off. One challenge in the Hispanic community is, if I am hurting, I don’t tell you I am hurting. You have to read between the lines, for example if someone lost their job. It is an ingrained idea in our culture that you don’t ask for help. We are working with Hispanic communities but they don’t want to ask for help. We are working with these folks and helping them understand, theologically, that things like unemployment insurance are not handouts.
One significant challenge for our faith communities is how undocumented members of our communities are getting help. If undocumented folks are getting paid under the table, how do we care for them? There are a lot of undocumented pastors and congregants. If a ministry worker in a Hispanic church is undocumented, the church cannot legally pay that person, so it is really complicated. I think there is a lack of understanding of the distinctives of the CARES Act and other federal legislation that addresses offering sustaining assistance during COVID-19, in terms of the differences between the cash assistance, unemployment insurance and the rules governing that program, and churches applying for the SBA loans. There is a lot of conflation and confusion around these distinctions between these government programs and the regulations and guidance governing their implementation. Many of our churches are not laying off pastors right now if they can help it. Unfortunately, some of our churches do not have the records they may need or the documentation that would be required for unemployment insurance if they lay people off. So much of the work of our congregations is unpaid and done by lay people, like the Pastor’s wife might be our accountant. This both hinders us in terms of the quality of our finances, operations, et cetera, but it also inhibits our folks from thinking in terms of applying for unemployment if they are not fully compensated in the first place.
Familia as the Sacred Animating Motivation for Every Area of Congregational Life
Familia for Hispanic congregations captures both the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. When we relate to each other, as individuals and as churches, as brothers and sisters in Christ, that familial way of being in the world calls us to share with each other what we are learning and how we can practice our faith together. Hispanic congregations and ministries, for too long, have needed to turn to outside resources, like consultants and trainers, to teach us how to build up our ability to reach our full potential in Christ. However, external resources are not often organically living and breathing our spiritual practices, traditions, culture and language.
One Hispanic pastor noted: “When you train a church, the people who go to that training are there to learn. But when those people have questions and concerns, they come back to the trainer, when they should instead be going back to their own networks within the Hispanic faith community for support.” This notion of familia guides how we work together and seek mentors from within the Hispanic faith family to guide us, not just spiritually, but how we apply our spirituality to our ministry activities and public engagement. We must equip our own faith-based leaders, as brothers and sisters in Christ, who can lead other Hispanic congregations and ministries, to serve as multipliers with the capacity to come alongside other congregational teams and coach them, as peer mentors to build up their own infrastructure. Multipliers, in the Hispanic tradition of familia, will be viewed as faithful relatives who walk alongside Hispanic ministry leaders, helping them integrate their missions and beliefs into their policies, practices, services and civic engagement. As one Hispanic leader recently shared: “We learn best together, whether it be about worship or community service or advocacy, in the context of our faith family.”
As we continue to grow upon our sacred understanding of familia, we pray that Hispanic faith voices will be heard, recognized and welcomed, for service partners and civic neighbors, in the public square.
¹ Allan Deck, "Latino Migrations and the Transformation of Religion in the United States: Frame the Question," in Christianities in Migration (2016). 263.
Dr. Gus Reyes serves on the Executive Committee of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC). He advances NHCLC’s strategic vision to unify, serve and represent the Hispanic Evangelical Community with the divine (vertical) and human (horizontal) elements of the Christian message all while advancing the Lamb’s agenda. Dr. Reyes also serves as the director of the Christian Life Commission with Texas Baptists.
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