‘There goes the neighborhood’
New book offers hope that diverse voices are working to find balance in changing U.S.
The people on the front lines of America’s cultural and demographic debate are Southern Baptist pastors in South Carolina, attorneys general in Utah and Indiana, Texas businessmen and many more. Sometimes, as with Houston, you can find every manner of leader among the change agents in one community. Their combined voices make clear that they and many like them are working to make America a welcoming place for everyone, long-established citizens and new arrivals alike.
In this adapted excerpt from “There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration,” author Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, examines the effort of a suburban Houston church leader to build bridges between the immigrant community and his largely Anglo congregation. In this section and throughout the book, Noorani poses the question: To whom does the responsibility fall to facilitate the interpersonal connections that are necessary to navigate communities’ cultural and demographic shifts?
In a fast-changing Texas, the church has the credibility to establish relationships between native-born and immigrant communities. According to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, 64 percent of adult Texans consider themselves “highly religious” and 63 percent say they pray daily. That puts people like David Fleming, senior pastor of Champion Forest Baptist Church, in a unique position to lead Texas forward.
A member of the Southern Baptist Convention, Champion Forest’s congregation of 13,000 is spread over three campuses, and the church’s weekly attendance of 5,400 easily puts it in the category of megachurch. Built like a running back, with a graying goatee, Fleming became senior pastor of Champion Forest in December 2006. He grew up in Central Florida and was licensed to preach at the age of 17 at First Baptist Church, Winter Garden, Florida. Ten years later, in 1992, he was ordained by New Zion Baptist Church in Covington, Louisiana.
For a pastor, the conflicts between the spiritual and the secular, the conservative and the liberal, the believer and the nonbelievers must be a never-ending dilemma. As I sat in his office, Fleming summarized the tension as a question, “How do you do what’s right both in the area of justice and in the area of mercy and compassion?”
In Houston, with its 37 megachurches, the church has the potential—some might argue the responsibility—to knit together different communities and ease the tension that comes with demographic change. This requires pastors to push out from their comfort zones with goals and strategies that may or may not grow their congregation. Says Fleming, “It is my job to serve those within the shadow of the church’s steeple.”
With this guiding principle, he engaged his community on immigrants and immigration. It was a difficult road to take, because conservative white evangelicals were more likely to listen to the media than their pastor when it came to immigration.
A personal experience changed Fleming’s perspective. In central Florida, Fleming experienced the tension of the Mariel boatlift, when thousands of Cubans were brought to the United States, but he felt “neutral” and at “a distance” from the lives of newcomers. That distance was shattered when he met Francisco.
Francisco had overstayed his immigration visa, was now undocumented, and had just learned that there were no options for him to legalize his status. Fleming remembered, “So I said, well, man, this is Champion Forest Baptist Church. We’ve got resources. We’ve got people. We can fix this.”
Fleming was surprised when it couldn’t be fixed through his extensive resources and relationships. “My job is to care for this person regardless of what he’s done, not in any way that would break the law further for my case or my involvement. How do I help him? How do I love him?” Fleming said he “couldn’t be neutral after I knew the names and faces.”
Fleming reached out to Champion Forest’s Spanish congregation, at that time a ministry with a membership of about 40. Fleming recalled asking the congregation’s pastor, Ramon Medina, “But what would it look like if maybe we just didn’t have a [Hispanic] mission, but we just sort of were one church. We drop the mission and receive you as members, and you become a member on our staff.”
While Francisco could not be protected from deportation, the change was transformational. “So in eight years we’ve gone from 40 to 2,800 Spanishspeaking [members] from 23 different countries.” Champion Forest did not simply put two congregations under one roof and hope for the best. Fleming wanted to empower his new congregants and make sure the church was influenced by their different cultures. “[Hispanic] people want to know two things when they come to a place like this: Is there anybody here like me? If there is, then I can come and maybe I can stay. But to become involved, I need to see people involved. I need to see people at the table making decisions, on the platform. So we’re real aggressive in hiring Spanishspeaking staff—bilingual and some only Spanish.” Fleming went on, “So we never had an issue [with the existing congregration]. I mean, I can’t tell you that nobody got upset about it. I can’t tell you nobody left. [But] I can tell you this: I don’t know their names.”
Mustafa Tameez, a Pakistani-born civic leader and political strategist who had been in Houston since 1994, tapped into a similar thread as we discussed the tension that comes with immigration in our country: “I think we have to have a far gentler conversation, [and realize] that when we use a word like diversity, not everyone sees that as a net positive. I think that when you say ‘more opportunity for my children,’ it is going to be interpreted by some as less opportunity for their children. So there is an obligation by those that care about inclusivity not to exclude that Anglo population.”
Houston shows that integration is a two-way street. Immigrants change themselves and change their communities. Some communities are comfortable with that change in identity, some struggle with it, and some are completely opposed. The tension can be resolved through the prism of one’s faith, as we saw with David Fleming and Champion Forest Baptist Church
For Tameez, it was the hyphen: “We have this hyphen. It is one thing that says we can have dual identities. We can be American and Hispanic. We can be American and Jewish. We can be American and Muslim. We can be anything hyphen American.” Of course, a hyphen alone will not ensure all jobs go to native-born Americans. Nor will a hyphen reduce the anger in someone’s blood when he believes an immigrant, or someone he believes is an immigrant, is accessing a public benefit without paying taxes.
But a hyphen is our simple way to value our collective identity as Americans and honor our unique histories as immigrants. As Mustafa put it, “The American hyphen is … our salvation in many ways.”