Leadership Development in Hispanic Congregations

9. March 2009 by David Alexander.

The missiological issues related to language peoples missions in the USA and inparticular Texas have become quite complicated. Due to the vast number of language peoples, population segments, and assimilation issues, missions among immigrants and their descendants is anoverwhelming conundrum. I have had the privilege of dialoguing with language planters and DOMs in at least 6 conventions and, over and over, the most evident challenges in evangelizing and churchplanting among language peoples are:o Multicultural aspects of the people groupo Lackluster and faulty disciplemaking/leadership development strategiesWhereas these can be found to different extents in any language group planting strategy, because of its size in our country the Hispanic community is a good candidate for illustrating a few of these missiological challenges. Churches that enthusiastically embark upon starting a Hispanic ministry often fail to think through missiological issues involved. At the risk of oversimplifying — because the mission field is far more complex than this - the mission team must consider the longterm goal. That is, if just a ministry to the people group is desired, then a certain standard programs can be implemented. However, if an autonomous and reproducing congregational body is the desired outcome, the strategy changes entirely. Furthermore, whether the target is the 1st or 2nd generationor later generation peoples has tremendous impact on mission strategy decisions. Every Hispanic church in America is a multi-national church. Therefore, the leadership needs to be able to relate to Spanish speakers of various nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds. Althoughthere are numerous success stories in importing ministers to help reach the American ethnic peoples, this is not the best solution, and lostness will only truly be impacted once the indigenous church canbegin to mass reproduce leaders from its own harvest. This is only happening well among a small minority of congregations. The Spanish speaking community is growing faster than available church leadership. This is at least a two-fold issue. One is the issue of traditional leadership paradigms that revolve around the conceptof the pastor as the key central figure who is the de facto congregational dictator. Even many Baptist Hispanic congregations view their pastor from traditional religious lenses as the area bishop or priest. He alone has authority from God and the congregation pays him to teach, preach, and do the work.Also, he has been given a 19th century model of discipleship that is lecture and classroomdriven, and centered around himself as the key disperser of information. The assumption made by the pastor and the congregation is that discipleship is happening if people are listening to thesermon or sitting in a Bible study. Unfortunately, because 95% of the Hispanics in America are oral peoples, this is a truly erroneous assumption. The second issue stems from a pressure derived from our societal expectations of academic preparation. Ministers with an accredited degree are placed on higher pedestals than those without. The barrier of language, academic requirements, availability, and sometimes residentialdocuments prohibit lay ethnic leaders from being able to serve as ministerial equals.Our societal expectations have caused a massive slowdown in leadership development. Whereas formal academic training has its place in personal development, disciplemaking and leadership development must take on a more nonformal “On-the-Job-Training” paradigm that uses reproducible mentoring models. Lay leaders need to be empowered to serve alongside their pastors with the sameauthority that Jesus grants all Christ followers in the Great Commission. The blessing is that resources and methods already exist that are incredibly reproducible and able to help the church develop leadersquickly and efficiently to employ a rapid multiplicative army of lay leaders and missionaries from our churches that will go on to reproduce themselves. However, the challenge is for pastors to let go oftraditional expectations and methodologies. For churches to keep up with the population explosion among the ethnic people groups, renewed emphasis must be given to the models that are employed in making disciples. Reproducible leaders can be developed quickly even as they are held to high standards of spiritual growth, quality training, ethics, and personal testimony. This is my heartbeat, to entrust myself to a next generation of leadership so that they will in turn do the same.

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