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HOUSTON?Four years ago, 15 couples met at Ryan’s restaurant in Houston to launch a new experiment. “I took the biggest gut check in my life,” said Sammy Lopez, Pastor of Fellowship Church of Houston, “and just followed the Lord.”
Hispanic culture is one of the fastest-growing cultures in the United States.
“It is very important that we reach them,” said Mike Gonzales, director of the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention’s Hispanic Initiative. “They can be one of the most challenging people groups for Caucasians to reach.”
There are over 9 million Hispanics in Texas, and most are nominally Catholic.
Third- and fourth-generation Hispanics often run into one huge problem?language.
While the first generation speaks fluent Spanish, each generation progressively understands less and less of its cultural language, Gonzales said.
“We tend to lose most of the second- and third-generation Hispanics in our churches to large mega-churches.” Gonzales explained. “They go where the programs are.”
Fellowship Church of Houston exists to evangelize the third-and fourth-generation Hispanics in Houston. “We wanted to develop a church to hold our (Hispanic) culture but to function in English,” Lopez said. “Education has changed our culture. Young Hispanics have masters and doctorates and we are reaching them.”
It is the vision of Fellowship Church to provide a church community that is family oriented and maintains the culture with the appropriate communication.
“We speak English but we still know what a ‘chalupa’ is,” Lopez said.
Already a pastor of a church in Houston, Lopez wasn’t looking for a new calling. It was the discussion at Ryan’s that planted the vision for Fellowship Church in his mind.
“I had to ask myself, ‘Do I stay here and fight for the Spirit of God to work or do I go with the Spirit of God?'” Lopez said, “God told me, ‘Write down what the perfect church would be.’ I did, then God said, ‘Go and do it.'”
Four years later Fellowship Church is still strong.
“God is the builder of Fellowship,” Lopez said. “I don’t mean to sound clichéd but Fellowship Church is completely God’s.”
“Everyone knows that the Hispanic population in Texas is exploding,” said Terry Coy, SBTC senior church planting strategist and a fluent Spanish speaker. “What many people are not aware of is that the young, English speaking, later-generation Hispanic population is the fastest-growing segment of Hispanic-Americans. That is, Texas is not only becoming more and more Hispanic, it is becoming more and more English-speaking Hispanic.
