Crossing Over Cultural Borders : Anglo, Latino Baptists Seek to Build Bond

It began with Baptist refugees from Cuba.

They settled into the neighborhood around Fullerton First Baptist Church about 40 years ago, then began spreading their faith to Mexican and other Latin American immigrants in the barrio nearby. Eventually, the Spanish-speaking congregation there grew to more than 100, requiring a pastor and Sunday service of its own.

This presented a dilemma for Senior Pastor Sam Hochstatter.

Like most churches in the county, Fullerton First Baptist began, as one member put it, “a normal white-bread church.” And some members at first were unused to, and in some cases intolerant of, the growing Latino congregation sharing their church, Hochstatter said.

Now, however, in what civil-rights leaders see as an all-too-rare solution to a common problem in scores of Orange County churches, Hochstatter and Jose Arreguin, pastor of the Hispanic Department, are taking steps to help the two congregations share activities and build relationships.

Three bilingual seminars on differences and common ground between the church’s English- and Spanish-speaking ministries will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday and Sept. 20 and 27 at the church, 212 E. Wilshire Ave. in Fullerton.

A combined worship service will also be held Sept. 17 to coincide with Hispanic Heritage Week in the American Baptist Church, Hochstatter said. The congregation has held combined services a few times each year for the past few years, he added.

At the same time, the pastors said they will launch an unusual fund-raising campaign for a bilingual weekly radio talk show with Anglo and Latino Christian themes. They hope to broadcast the program beginning in January to Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. (Arreguin also broadcasts a short-wave radio program, Una Palabra al Corazon--A Word to the Heart--from station KVOH in Van Nuys to Latin America.)

In the beginning, it was unclear whether the congregations would be able to accept each other, said Arreguin, 72, a native of Mexico who graduated from the USC School of Theology and obtained a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg in France.

Arreguin, who joined the church about 10 years ago, started a fund-raising campaign and began seeking a separate church site, but he soon discovered that moving would be too expensive.

It was then, about five years ago, that the pastors decided it would be best for the congregations to try to unite.

Hochstatter looked, he said, but could found no other “multi-ethnic model” in Orange County for integrating a church.

Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, said that nearly 100 churches in the county are so-called “nesting churches”--that is, they either rent or give space to an ethnic minority congregation. But Kennedy said most of those churches have “squandered” the opportunity to build intergroup relationships.

In Protestant nesting churches, Kennedy said, “many have begun their relationships with the desire to do things together, but most have had a difficult time living up to that ideal.” Some churchgoers, he said, have expressed hostility over such matters as the smell of the minority groups’ food, their attitudes in regard to church maintenance and contributing toward improvements.

“In some cases, the host churches asked the other congregation to move on or they upped the rent,” he said, or they “continue in a situation where there’s not (an) interchange.”

“In many cases, there were not good structures for communication,” Kennedy added.

Catholic parishes, in particular, have been struggling with the changes in demography, Kennedy said. Veteran parishioners have argued over such changes as adding Masses in Spanish, whether the Spanish-language Mass would be at a more desirable time than the English-language ones, and whether such services would be in the main sanctuary or in a hall, he said.

“Some segregation is needed initially, so everyone can understand the language of worship,” Kennedy said. But “the ideal situation is, like children learning English in school, you have time with your own language group . . . and other times when you can be bilingual and share activities with” the English-speaking group.

At Fullerton First Baptist, the Latino service led by Arreguin begins Sundays at 9 a.m., with the Anglo service led by Hochstatter at 10:35. (A Vietnamese congregation of about 50 Protestants also rents a room from the church but is not included in the seminars because it belongs to a different denomination, Arreguin said.)

For at least the past 10 years, the two groups have mingled in “alley parties” between services, and in youth clubs and nursery and athletic facilities. Latino children, who are mostly bilingual, attend Sunday school in English and sing in the choir.

Arreguin said he believes the Latinos will stay in the church “as long as the Anglo congregation is willing to help us stay.”

While most of the 650 or so Anglo church members have been receptive, a few families quit the church about 1 1/2 years ago, Hochstatter said. “They did not like differences. . . . It was too threatening. Too frightening.”

The pastor said he has preached to his congregation that if it could not learn to live together, it would have to “turn the church over to the Hispanics and call ourselves the First Baptist Church of someplace else. Maybe Palm Springs. That’s where the white flight is going.”

More important, Hochstatter said, he believes the Gospel challenges Christians to understand one another.

“I can’t understand why people who call themselves Christians can’t be together to celebrate Christ,” he said.

One member of the Fullerton church, Ricardo Vergara, 32, an immigrant from Chile who now lives in Diamond Bar, said the seminars will be important.

“You get to ask about what the other culture thinks about things,” Vergara said.

Moreover, he said, being together helps break down stereotypes.

“If they hear me speak Spanish, they might think I clean hotels,” said Vergara, who is a sales representative. “We have people in our congregation who are engineers and doctors.”

Formality is one of the differences between the two congregations that the pastors say they hope to explore at the seminars.

“Anglos tend to be more formal,” Arreguin said. “They look to order as (a) main principle of social life. We . . . are more spontaneous. That probably frightens some Anglos. They make us nervous--they put everything on a calendar. We keep it in our heads.”

At both Anglo and Latino services, worshipers sing the formal, New England-style hymns used by the American Baptist congregation. But in the evening service for the Latino congregation, Arreguin said, “we play the guitar and the trumpet. We clap our hands.”

Because only 20% of the Latino congregation is bilingual, neither pastor is pushing for a joint congregation at this time.

“We dream of that,” Arreguin said. “We feel our children very naturally will bring that into reality.”

For now, he said, “the church wants to train Anglos and Hispanics to live together. The church is a reflection of what is in the outer society. The church by nature is a place of reconciliation.”