Church a ‘model’ for inclusiveness
Champion Forest Baptist embraces a changing community
When Pastor David Fleming arrived a decade ago at Champion Forest Baptist, one of Houston’s largest evangelical churches, he took stock of its mostly white congregation and made a bold decision. Sitting between Cypress and Spring, the church reflected its neighboring McMansions but not the apartment complexes popping up around FM 1960.
“We want to reach all of the people within the shadow of our steeple,” he preached to his predominantly Republican parish that includes Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman and state Rep. Debbie Riddle, who once likened the children of immigrants to “little terrorists.”
Recruiting a Hispanic
and black pastor, he moved the main English-language Sunday service earlier and convened a Spanish-language sermon at the prime-time 11 a.m. slot. Lamented by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most segregated hour in this nation,” it was a powerful gesture that Champion Forest could be different, even fulfill King’s vision for churches to “remove the yoke of segregation.”
Fleming envisioned one multilingual, multi-ethnic church, a rarity among Southern Baptists who have only 1 percent of churches meeting that criteria. As the nation’s premier evangelical denomination posted nine straight years of membership losses, Champion Forest doubled to nearly 8,000 people, including almost 3,000 in what Fleming said is the state’s largest evangelical Spanish-language congregation.
Catering to both the Republican soccer momand the Mexican construction worker she wants to deport can be a challenge of biblical proportions. Fleming tackled it head-on, becoming among the first leading evangelicals to push for comprehensive immigration reform. He pointed to demographic studies showing that of school-age children in the church’s radius, equal thirds are Hispanic, black and white.
“We can either say this community is changing, and we should embrace it or we should relocate,” he told his flock. “My preference is to embrace it.”
His views don’t sit well with everyone. But at a time when debate on race and immigration is laced with harsh rhetoric likening Mexicans to criminals and rapists, at Champion Forest, it is more nuanced, at least publicly. Fleming thinks it’s precisely his congregation’s diversity that helps spur conversation politicians can’t seem to have. And as the issue has not only divided the country but propelled Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, himself controversial among evangelicals, it’s arguably never been more critical.
“Our nation and our cultures are struggling to live together, to love each other, to work together in spite of our differences,” Fleming said. “I’m convinced the church ought to be the model for how that’s possible.” ‘Anyone is welcome’
When Fleming, 51, was approached for the job in 2006, he told the search committee the region’s diversity intrigued him. He wanted to be “very intentional” about reaching the community.
“I don’t mean saying ‘Anyone is welcome; they can come.’ I’m talking about being very strategic to invite them and set up a ministry that is very appealing multiculturally, from the songs we sing to the things we say,” he said.
Fleming grew up in Orlando, Fla., preached in Atlanta and outside of New Orleans, and wrote his doctoral thesis on using demographics to evangelize. He appointed Ramon Medina, a Colombian immigrant, to expand the Spanish-language ministry — then just a few dozen people — and hired bilingual staff. It was clipping along when, around 2008, Fleming came across the distraught nephew of a staff member in the hallway. He asked how he could help.
“You can’t do anything,” the man, Francisco, despaired, explaining that he overstayed his visa and soon would be deported.
Surely, Fleming thought, he could solve the problem. Several state representatives attend his church. He knows congressmen.
“The more people I called, the more I realized how polarized the issue had become ... with no honest conversation about how to solve what is an obvious problem,” he said.
One side, Fleming said, advocated building a wall and deporting all 11 million immigrants here illegally. The other seemed not to understand the need to hold people accountable to the law. Fleming shared his concerns with the conservative Houston Area Pastor Council. In his own church, about 1 in 5 congregants in the Spanish-language service is thought to be here illegally.
“We have to find some way to deal with them in a way that is both just and compassionate, that respects the rule of law but deals with them as compassionate human beings made in the image of God,” Fleming said.
The council issued a declaration calling for lawmakers to secure the border, then overhaul the immigration system. Immigrants here who have committed no other crimes should have a pathway to legal status.
Pastors like Fleming were witnessing the demographics of their churches change. Hispanics account for nearly 7 million of the nation’s 68 million evangelicals, the church’s fastest-growing segment, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Preachers began making the biblical case to thousands of conservatives every Sunday.
In October 2009, the National Association of Evangelicals endorsed a resolution supporting comprehensive immigration reform. In 2011, the Southern Baptist Convention followed. It was enormous.
“The path to immigration reform is that we need to seek conservative support from the South and the Southeast,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C. “The only way that happens is if evangelical leaders on a local level see it as a moral and biblical responsibility.”
Like others, Fleming took his case to the pulpit. But his parish includes Riddle, one of Harris County’s most conservative legislators, who lost her primary for the first time in 14 years this March to Valoree Swanson. The district, which borders the church on the east, is solidly Republican in a Bible Belt state. Fleming was undeterred.
“He put that immigration issue in front of him, and he just stood up and let us have it,” recalled Mark Lanier, one of the nation’s top trial lawyers, who teaches an adult Bible study class of 750 people at Champion Forest. “He said, ‘If God is Republican, Democrat, conservative or liberal, these are people who we need to give God’s love to, need to minister to, in a way that’s legally right. We can’t turn our hearts.”
Lanier, a lifelong Republican who contributes generously to races, said he and his wife “picked our jaws up off the ground.”
“It was such a gutsy thing for him to say and to do,” he said.
In Lanier’s case, Fleming was preaching to the choir. His property caretaker, Manuel Duran, came here illegally from Mexico when he was 14. He stayed in overcrowded apartments, working hard landscaping jobs. In 1986, he received his residency through President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty and is now a U.S. citizen. His children attend college.
“The world is a better place because of Manuel Duran, because at 14 he knew he had no future where he was,” Lanier said. “Weneed to make a way for these people who are contributing to America to come here.”
Not everyone in Fleming’s congregation feels this way. Riddle, a horse breeder in Tomball, said Fleming is an outstanding pastor, but the two don’t see eye to eye on immigration.
During the 2011 legislative session, Riddle filed two bills similar to a 2010 Arizona law considered the nation’s harshest immigration measure in years. She doesn’t see a conflict with Scripture like Leviticus 19 that Fleming cites in support of immigration reform: “Treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
“It’s way too much to ask anybody to agree with their husband or their pastor or their children or everyone else 100 percent of the time,” Riddle said.
Whereas she sees Fleming’s position on the issue as falling in the middle, she said she lands on the side of rule of law.
“That does not mean we don’t have compassion,” she said. “But if we have no borders, we have no country. We have laws for a reason.” Finding a balance
Scott Riling, Riddle’s former chief-of-staff who is now a pastor at Champion Forest, said borders in biblical times were more fluid than today, when nations exist so that its citizens can determine what laws should apply. He compared illegal immigration to strangers moving into your house.
“I can say, ‘OK. Treat my home and my cars like your own.’ Or, I can say, ‘We need to talk about this. You can’t just demand you want to live in my home,’ ” he said. “It doesn’t mean there’s not times where we do charitable giving, acts of service, where I might be reaching out to those less fortunate.”
In testimony to a U.S. Senate committee in 2013, Fleming imagined a midway.
“We are to be guided in all we do to protect the value and dignity of human life,” he said. “We must have laws and a legal system that enables us to live out those values.”
Balancing the Bible’s call for compassion to strangers with its instruction to follow worldly laws has long divided evangelicals on immigration reform. Fewer white evangelical Protestants than other Christians — 49 percent — support a pathway to citizenship provided immigrants meet certain requirements, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. Thirty percent favor deporting immigrants here illegally compared to 19 percent of all Americans.
Lanier, who owns a 17,000-square-foot theological library with 85,000 volumes, said those favoring the rule-of-law argument would point to Romans 13.
“The authorities that exist have been established by God,” it reads. “Whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”
Lanier sees it differently, noting that slavery once was also legal.
“The law is what the law is, but that doesn’t mean, as Christians, if we think the law is unjust, we won’t refuse to follow an unjust law,” he said. “As Christians we should try to change the law to be more reflective of the character and heart of the church.”
Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, said evangelicals struggle with opposite pulls — wanting to hold lawbreakers accountable as a matter of national policy while supporting parishioners under their own steeple.
“The weakness of the evangelical position is that many are calling for something like immediate deportation that they will not want in their own neighborhood or congregation,” Mohler said.
Fleming sees the spectrum of his church as a gift, congregating people with different backgrounds in one space every week.
“It’s easy to make a macro-statement like, say, send 11 million people home, but when you know some of them and you care for them and you know they don’t fit the stereotype, it becomes more personal,” he said.
The unity of Champion Forest’s Spanish-language and English-language congregations is unusual. Many evangelical churches trying to diversify loan their space to Spanish-language or black parishes but remain essentially separate. Here, it’s all one. Church literature and events are in both languages, and Fleming himself went to Costa Rica a few years ago to study Spanish. Planning is done together. On Sundays, the Spanish-language congregation files in as the English-language one streams out, and for Christmas and New Year, services combine.
A little more than half of the congregants are white, about a third are Hispanic, 12 percent are black, and 2 percent Asian. The diversity puts the church in the vanguard. Nearly 9 in 10 congregations across the nation attend worship with parishes where 80 percent consist of a single racial group, according to a Duke University study.
One recent Sunday, Fleming and Medina preached the second chapter in Acts about the Holy Spirit enabling a diverse crowd to hear the disciples in their native language. The message was the same, but the approach tailored.
“You just can’t learn another language with Rosetta Stone this quickly,” Fleming told his 9:30 a.m. service. “This is the language of God.” ‘A very open church’
For Medina’s Spanish-language service, he recalled stumbling through a job interview in poor English but miraculously getting the gig. The Holy Spirit, he said, spoke through him.
Outside, the church’s busy lobby seemed like a veritable tower of Babel as Spanish and English darted across the room.
“Christ excludes no one and neither should we,” said Don York, who retired from the oil and gas industry and has attended Champion Forest with his wife Betty for almost 20 years. The couple said they could not be more supportive of Fleming, but insisted that he backed only legal immigration.
Emerging from a Spanish-language Bible study, Claudia Lopez, a teacher from Mexico, said she began coming here five years ago and quickly felt at home.
“This is a very open church,” she said.
But points of inevitable conflict emerge.
“All of us have had acquaintances who one wishes could have their papers,” said her husband, Juan Carlos, who is from Costa Rica. “These are good people, workers.”
At times, Medina must counsel families who have had relatives deported under policies likely supported by many in the church.
“Sometimes it’s the consequence for their acts. ... But sometimes it is because of nothing, and that is very hard,” the pastor said. “These families came to the United States looking for opportunity. It’s the same thing as the fathers of this nation when they came 300 years ago.”