Well, again, thanks for this opportunity. My
wife, Hilda, is... Hilda and I have been
blessed with being here in Abilene.
This is our fourth year, and being in ministry
at St. Paul United Methodist Church has just
been a wonderful blessing for us.
But I want to bring to you a personal
experience, a personal journey.
Actually, there's a handout that Anne is going
to share with you.
And in this outline that you will receive, I'll
just talk about housekeeping items before I go
into this presentation.
In the section of the introduction to this
presentation, there's a personal testimony
right underneath.
There are five different sections.
They read as follows.
My Mexican Journey, then right next to it,
American Church Experience, then right next to
it, Rethinking My Journey, and then Rethinking
American Christianity, and then Theological Implications.
So, that would be the path. That's going to be
the format of the presentation.
What you have underneath then, Part 1, Part 2,
and Part 3, is the content of that presentation.
But I will follow the format as lined up at the introduction.
I was 17 years old when my call to the ministry
was defined even further by God.
It was the middle of the night, and someone
came and turned the light on in my room and
woke me up.
I looked at the door, and it was my parents and
my sisters.
I said, what's up? What's going on?
And they said, well, you woke us up.
And I said, no, I didn't. You did.
And then they said, yes, you were speaking in a
loud voice as if you were preaching, but it was
not in Spanish.
And when I heard those words, then I remembered
my dream.
The dream was that I was in front of a
congregation preaching in English.
Now, I was 17 years old. I did not know any English.
And I was completely, at that moment, I was
completely overwhelmed by a passion for
learning English
so that I could communicate the experience of
grace that we had had in Mexico.
Well, I finished in my high school, and I got a
phone call. I lived in Juarez, Mexico.
Probably you're familiar with that city.
Juarez, Mexico, right next to El Paso, Texas.
And at the time, we were dating, and I had this
phone call from the Lydia Patterson Institute,
which is a school in El Paso, Texas, a
Methodist school that is directed to help
Mexican students to learn English
and then to prepare them for high school.
And they were offering a scholarship. So I
said, hey, I want a scholarship.
So I went, I learned my English, and my dream
came true, eventually,
so that I could be in a church, in a
congregation with my brothers and sisters from
the United States,
sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a
language that was not my own, but God provided
the opportunity.
And so that was part of a journey, a journey
that I want to share with you,
because not only it changed my life, but also
has allowed me to see that God is working in
many ways
in the Christian church all over the world, but
specifically in the United States,
and that we need to hear voices that we seldom
hear from, voices that may sound a little bit different,
voices perhaps with a Mexican accent.
And so that's why I want to share with you an
American pathway from a Mexican journey.
And we start the journey in describing
subjectively some of my observations of the
Mexican culture,
some of my personal experiences, and also part
of my research into my own culture from Mexico.
And the first thing I want to share with you
about that journey is the way we Mexicans think
of ourselves,
the identity issue of Mexicans.
Well, let me say that a Mexican is a mestizo.
Mestizo is the product of two races, the
European race and the Amerindian race, coming together.
Mestizo actually is a race.
It is not a race in the United States.
You don't find that in the census, which makes
a problem of identity.
And I don't know how you call this.
That's my soapbox.
Is that how you say it?
I won't go into that.
I'm just going to say that all Latin America,
we find the mestizo race as one that is
well-documented, well-researched,
and it is one that brings these two different
experiences from Europe and Latin America together.
Now, this mestizo person that looks probably
like me,
this is a person who has an influence from
Europe, from Spanish,
Spaniards who were already mixed with 900 years
of presence from the Arab culture.
These Spanish people were already mixed with
Celtic and Gaelic influences.
And so what arrived to Mexico in the 1500s was
an already mixed race.
They mixed with hundreds of Native American
tribes, which were all different.
They had different dialects, they had different customs,
and so what you produce is a fragmented person,
a person who is completely divided within
himself or herself.
The mestizo person is one that has an identity crisis.
And it's hard.
At the very core of who we are, there is pain.
Because Mestizaje, the mixing of the two races,
was a result of a systematic rape of women from
Mexico and men from Spain.
When my mother, for the first time, shared with
me the words that she heard from her grandmother,
that her grandmother had been raped by El Senor
Martinez from Spain,
when I heard that, there was something within
my gut, in my heart, it just hurt.
To know that I was the product of violence, and
that that is inherent in my own race.
And so there's some kind of identity crisis,
there's some kind of fragmentation that goes on
within ourselves.
And even Oscar Martinez, a university professor
in the University of Arizona,
he even says that Mexicans are fragmented
because of geographical situations.
He says that Mexicans are so different, the
ones on the coast, on the West Coast, East Coast,
than the ones in central Mexico.
There are two mountain systems that go from
north to south.
And so there are so many differences,
geographically speaking.
So you name it, a Mexican, a Mestizo, is
divided at the core.
Now let's talk about the American experience.
I believe that we have a problem in
Christianity here in the United States.
We are divided at the core.
We have not been able to resolve our differences,
we have struggled over our fragmented identity
as a Christian church in general.
And we're constantly having these wars and fights,
the liberals against the conservatives, the
traditionalists against the charismatics.
Not to mention all the denominations that exist.
It's just overwhelming.
Just here in Abilene, I mean, we moved to
Abilene three years ago,
and we're finding a church in every corner.
Not in every corner, but almost.
It feels like they're everywhere, in all kinds
of churches.
We have also fights between ethnic groups
within the Christian church.
And so we segregate ourselves, so the Hispanics
go to one side,
and the African-Americans have their own church,
and then the Anglo-Americans have their own church.
So Christianity in general is fragmented.
And for so many years we have struggled in
keeping our unity going.
And that is something that we need to pay
attention to.
Worst of all, we also follow this geographical dislocation.
Just like the Mexicans have problems and
differences because of the geography,
here in the United States, in the southern part
of the United States,
there's one type of Christianity.
And then the Bible Belt.
And then we say, well, the western coast, you
know, those liberals.
All the liberals up there, the northeast liberals.
I don't know what the Midwest, maybe they're
the mediocre, the middle of the road, I don't know.
But in a way, we're also reflecting differences
because of geographical circumstances.
And we are struggling as a Christian church to
keep the unity in the spirit of truth and peace.
Now we go to the rethinking my journey.
This is what I personally did.
I now think of myself differently.
As a mestizo, I'm not just fragmented.
But you know, because of all that influence,
all those influences,
all those wonderful races that comprised mestizaje,
I can tell you today that I'm blessed.
I'm reached.
I have a rich heritage.
I'm able to communicate.
Actually, many times I'm confused.
If I'm in Chicago area visiting our daughter,
there are people from India that come to me
and they start speaking in their language.
And there are people from Pakistan that have
approached me, people from Palestine.
They just don't know who you are because I have
a face that can be confused for any other
ethnic heritage.
But that's what we call the cosmic race.
I want to be humble here.
Jose Vasconcelos, one of the most important
historians and philosophers and educators in Mexico,
he coined this concept, the cosmic race, to
talk about the mestizo.
Because the mestizo is the result of that rich
heritage that makes you a citizen of the world.
One that can understand people from many, many
races because you have them all.
Because within you, you have all that richness.
So the cosmic race is part of who we are and
the blood of the world's community runs through
our veins.
Now, we need to keep ourselves humble, granted.
But I believe that we, as a cosmic race, are
able to bridge the differences.
So now rethinking American Christianity, we
need to reclaim our identity.
We need to think of ourselves in a different way.
We need to accept that diversity is okay in the
Christian church.
Because that is the essence of divinity.
That is how God chose to express himself in his creation.
When he created a tree, he did not create just
a tree of one kind.
But just look at the creation and nature is
overwhelmingly diverse.
And it is a reminder that that kind of God is
the one who created the church.
Now, although I have found many people who look
like me, there's nobody in the world,
or there's never been anyone in the world
exactly like me or like you.
Which is good, in my case.
It's good.
But let me tell you, we need to accept that
diversity is something that God meant to happen
within the church.
Now, diversity calls us for unity, but not uniformity.
You need to hear that loud and clear.
I'm not asking the Christian church of all
Christianity to build uniformity.
Because it's easier to build uniformity.
Let's just write down the list of all the
things that we have in common.
And let's all embrace the same thing.
That's not what God intended to be.
It's more difficult to create unity.
Because unity is the acceptance that I am
different than you are.
But unity is also the acceptance that I can
love you, even though you're so different,
and think differently than I do.
And we were created to be in separate places,
but God created a bridge.
Those two places that are united by a bridge
that I call the church, are supposed to stay in
different places.
But we can be connected.
We can be united.
So we need to start rethinking in our
experience of Christianity,
in order to advance the Gospel of Christ and
connect with society.
Let me just give you briefly an implication in
our theological thinking.
We must come to the realization that the church
needs to experience Koinonia.
Koinonia is fellowship.
Love and acceptance.
This is great.
I think we represent various traditions, faith traditions,
and I encourage you to go to your places, to
your cities, to your churches,
and just make a welcoming spirit, or show a
welcoming spirit to everyone,
in the name of Christ, and Experience Koinonia
and fellowship.
Let's go to the next part of my journey.
How Mexicans see themselves.
In my personal understanding, there is a little
bit of victim mentality in Mexico.
And this victim mentality has taken us to see
people and blame our misery,
because those people have caused our misery.
And not only this blaming game is part of that mindset,
but also we don't take responsibility for ourselves.
We expect somebody else to come and help us,
and help us get out of our own difficulties and struggles.
In Mexico, there's a phrase that we use a lot.
Que Te Ayude El Gobierno.
Let the government help you.
And we use that for everything, even for jokes,
but it's so much in our mind,
and is one of the ways we advance that mindset
of victim mentality,
looking for somebody to blame,
and looking for somebody else to give us what
we need.
Well, in the American church experience,
Christians blame their demise on secularism,
post-modernism, modernism, liberal thinking,
conservative thinking.
We're always blaming somebody else for our
situation in our churches.
We look around and we see our church struggling,
and we see that we're going down and we're dying,
and our members are in a very negative,
pessimistic view,
and what we're about to discover is we're just
looking for somebody else to blame.
And that game still is true in our churches today.
We also blame this in social changes.
We say, well, in the 1950s, the churches were
filled with people,
but the 1960s came and the social changes came
in that time, in the 70s,
and because of that, we are in the situation
we're in right now.
So we're blaming an outside force for our own demise,
and that is not a very good thing to do.
And we are now turning to, in order to grasp
for a solution,
we don't look at ourselves, we don't look at God,
we're turning to business models to recreate
and rethink church.
And so let's, I have read the books, so don't
get me wrong.
In my own faith tradition, we are asked to read
Good to Great,
Deep Change, The Tipping Point.
You know, those are the classic business models
that are applied to Christianity.
And so now we are trying to find a solution
outside the church.
How, let me share with you how I rethink my
journey in this sense.
I now see myself differently.
I am responsible for my own failures, and I
take responsibility for that,
but I am also responsible for the solutions.
And one of the things we need to do as
Christians is the same thing.
We need to come face to face to God and say,
God, if our church, if our denomination is failing,
we're not going to blame it on somebody else
but on ourselves.
And you know what you're going to find?
You're not going to find a God that is ready to judge.
You're going to find a God who is ready to forgive.
And to say, okay, you're coming to a moment of confession,
let me show you my grace.
Let me show you how powerful I am to get that denomination,
that church, that congregation out of the
situation you're finding yourself in.
And at that moment, God will turn your church around.
Now, we saw that in Mexico.
It was 1971-72.
The Methodist Church of Mexico was celebrating
100 years of Methodist presence in the country.
And the leaders of the church, my dad is a
Methodist minister,
so he was part of that leadership and movement.
They hired an American company that dealt with
surveys and statistics.
And in the middle of our celebration,
they came to us with the most challenging and
daunting results of their research.
They said, the Methodist Church of Mexico, if
it is judged and evaluated as a business,
it's been dead for 25 years.
And then they gave us the evidences.
Churches are closing.
Membership is decreasing.
No professions of faith.
The ministers are quitting the ministry.
And those who are still there are just there
because it's a profession.
And that was the situation of my father.
At that time, 1972, my parents were separated.
So my mother took me and my sisters to central Mexico.
I thought it was an extended vacation because
we went to school over there.
My father stayed in northern Mexico in his
church preaching.
Go figure.
And we experienced the absence of love because
they were separated.
On April 1972, they decided to get it over with.
So they came back together in northern Mexico.
On April of that year, there was a revival that
just swept the whole northern part of Mexico.
The Methodist Church is just caught in the fire
of the Spirit.
My parents, they went to the altar, accepted
Christ as personal Savior, a preacher.
I'm sorry, that just happens in the Methodist Church.
My mother, the president of the Methodist Women
from all Mexico,
coming to Christ, having an experience of conversion.
My sisters, myself, in the altar just accepting Christ.
When we come to God, we come clean and say,
God, forgive us.
You're not going to find a God who judges.
You're going to find a God who is gracious
enough to lift you up.
Not just you personally, but your church, your denomination.
And God is so powerful that He will turn it around.
My parents are still together. My daddy is 80
years old, I think.
He's starting a new church in El Paso, Texas.
My parents are just like the energizer. They're
going and going.
Really quick, let me share with you the
theological implication here.
That we need a Christology of victory.
And this requires an experience of ending ourselves.
Philippians 2 gives us a very good example of this.
The Bible tells us that Jesus made himself
nothing by taking the very nature of a servant
and being found in the appearance as a man.
He humbled himself. Therefore God exalted him
to the highest place.
So Jesus went through this experience of kenosis.
This emptying of himself so that he would
experience victory.
We need to come from the moment of being a
victim and say, God, forgive us.
So that we can experience victory.
And that is part of the theological implication.
Let me share a third part of the journey.
How Mexicans feel about, how we feel about ourselves.
There was one of our presidents, he had a
famous quote.
He said, poor Mexico, so far away from God, so
close to the United States.
Mexicans deal with inferiority.
We feel less.
Just try living all your life in a country that
is neighboring the most powerful country of the world.
Just try, imagine always looking north.
And I lived in the northern part of Mexico, so
I guess that makes me a Mexican Yankee.
So I'm in Chihuahua, Mexico, looking north,
hearing all this news about the United States
and listening to all these great things about
this country.
And you know, you really have to be very strong
in your healthy ego so that you cannot feel less.
But there's a lot of sense of inferiority,
psychologically speaking, in the Mexican.
I believe in the American church experience,
some Christian churches compare themselves to
denominations that are stronger.
Or maybe your congregation, you look at the
mega church down the street.
And you compare yourself and you think, oh
these guys have it all together.
Well, they have the resources.
Well, they can do whatever they want because
they have everything in their ability to do.
We don't.
And so we began making ourselves less.
We began feeling less as Christians, as
churches, as denominations.
So we need to rethink that.
The way I did it, personally, is that now I
feel differently about myself.
I believe that I'm, as a Mexican, I can contribute.
God has given us the capacity to contribute to
the credibility and the confidence and the
competence to contribute to the world.
Well, do you like chocolate?
For those who like it and can eat it.
That's something that Mexicans contributed. Vanilla.
The first patent of color TV.
There are so many things that Mexicans
contributed to the world, or have contributed
to the world.
There's a sense of competence, credibility.
Let's talk about the Christian church.
I believe that we need to rethink and restore
our confidence.
That we must feel capable and confident because
we have a lot to contribute to the world.
Your faith, my faith, is capable of
transforming people's lives.
We can make a difference in our neighborhoods,
in our communities, in our cities.
We have a lot to contribute to.
But, you know, sometimes because we feel less,
because we are bogged down by our insecurities,
we're not able to surpass that and go and touch
the life of someone who needs the grace of God.
So I want us to make sure that we rethink our
way and restore our confidence.
For that we need a missiology of competence,
and that's our theological implication.
And we can do all things through Christ who
strengthened us.
One last thing that I want to share with you in
this journey is how Mexicans perceive their future.
There's a sense of pessimism in Mexico.
Maybe it was because of the Native American,
the Native Indians, and a little bit of
Catholic influence,
the predeterminism of Catholicism, the one that
started in Mexico.
Catholicism has changed a lot since.
But one of the things that Mexicans really
developed was this sense of skepticism about life.
We're doomed. There's no hope.
So no matter what you do, you're not going to a
good place.
It doesn't matter what you do.
Well, I believe that that's also part of the
experience of Christian churches in the United States.
Christian churches perceive that their death is imminent.
Just look at the numbers, they say.
The numbers indicate that each year these
denominations are losing people.
So by the year of 2020, this denomination is
going to disappear.
And not only that, we're paying attention to
those statistical formulas.
And our own congregations, they're terrified
because they just see those numbers and they
say there is no hope.
We are doomed.
And we're dealing with that pessimism.
And then somebody comes with a new idea, and we
treat that person with skepticism.
And we say, well, it worked with that person,
with that church, in that city, in that community,
but it's not going to work with us.
And so we are dealing with that kind of mentality.
So what we need is one of the things that I did.
I now perceive my future differently.
Like they say, I can change my stars.
I can make a decision and say, I'm not going to
go down that road.
But if God is offering me a possibility of life
and of hope, I'm choosing to go in that path.
That's why migrant workers are here from
Mexico, because they know that there's opportunity.
And they choose that path.
It's not an easy one.
And they come to the frontera, the border.
And you know what the frontera means in Mexico.
The power of semantics, frontera.
Frontera, if you translate that literally into
English, the word is frontier.
The frontier here, the mindset of frontier in
the United States, is a line that you're always pushing.
The frontier, you're always expanding it.
And you go through the struggles of finding the
land that you want to conquer.
And it doesn't matter if you have to go over
the hills and in the valleys or through the rivers.
The frontier is something that you always pushed.
Well, we call the border frontera.
And Mexicans are always pushing that line.
We call that a border.
That means it stops here.
That's where it's supposed to stop, right?
There's no, there's a wall, there's all kinds
of border patrol, vigilance, and all of that.
But in the mindset of Mexicans, they're always
pushing the line.
Because it's a frontera anyways.
It's a frontier mindset.
Well, we want to rethink the church in the same way.
Our generation, we need to renew our hope.
God is calling us to push the line of the
borders that our own denominations and
congregations have placed.
Because of those borders, we're not seeing the
needs that are outside.
Because of those walls, we are unable to feel
the hurt of people who are without hope.
And as Christians, we are called to push that line.
And to go beyond the walls and go and preach
and proclaim a gospel of hope.
So we need to rethink the way we do things.
This requires an eschatology of destiny.
Which means a proclamation.
Kerygma means proclamation.
And we must share this with the world.
Let me finish with this.
In order for us to rethink church, we need to
experience a rebirth.
There's no other way.
We can rethink based on theories and ideas and concepts.
But that's not going to help.
We must experience a rebirth.
Individually and also in our denominations or
in our congregations.
Let me call the attention to the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit has that ability to give birth
to things.
He was present in Genesis 1.
The Bible tells us that when God was creating
the world,
the Spirit of God was hovering, was about to
give birth.
And so it was the Word of God, but the presence
of the Spirit of God
that allowed creation to come to being.
And then also the Bible tells us that in the
most dramatic,
most life-changing moment of humanity,
when God sent His Son to this earth,
it was the Holy Spirit who was involved in the
conception of Jesus,
the Son of God.
The birthing capacity of the Holy Spirit.
Not only that, when Jesus said,
I'm gone, now you go make disciples,
but don't forget the power of the Spirit.
So the 120 people went to the upper room and
guess what?
Guess who came?
The Holy Spirit gave birth to the church.
And because of the work of the Spirit,
you and I are here.
Do you want to rethink your church?
Do you want to do things differently in your congregations,
in your denominations?
We need the power of the Holy Spirit.
There's no other way.
If you take something today,
if you remember just one thing,
is when you pray, you ask God,
send your Holy Spirit to my life, to my church,
to my denomination.
Fill us with a brand new hope, capacity, identity,
so that we can proclaim that kind of message.
And you know what?
God will send it.
And you will be filled with the power of the Spirit.
Would you pray with me?
God, we just don't want to speak about concepts
and ideas.
We speak from experience.
That it is because of what you have done,
through the presence and the Ministry of your Spirit,
that all of us are here.
We all are a result of the work of your Spirit.
But we look into the future, Lord Jesus.
And future generations need to be reassured that
this present generation is going to be filled
with the Spirit
to continue with the work of the church.
And so I pray God that as we go to our places
of worship,
our communities,
that we go ignited with your Spirit and your power.
And I pray for this blessing for all of us
in the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit.
And all the people say, Amen.