Cultivating an Ivory Tower’s Grass Roots

If you’re looking for Jesse Miranda’s new office at Vanguard University, don’t bother asking the busy professionals bustling about the Costa Mesa campus. Chances are, they haven’t heard of him yet. Your best bet is to ask the gardeners or the cooks.

Since arriving in September with a portfolio of advanced religious degrees and a reputation as the nation’s leading Latino evangelical, Miranda has made it a point to introduce himself to the workers at the private Christian college. They’re virtually the only other Latinos at the small, predominantly white school across from the Orange County Fairgrounds.

“I’m Jesse Miranda,” says the short man with a warm smile. “I’m new here. Hablas Espanol?”

At lunch this week, the kitchen help greeted Miranda, returning his smiles. One man offered a “buenas tardes” as he hurried by with a tray. An Asian woman in uniform stopped briefly to practice a few Spanish words of her own, flashing a big grin for her new tutor.

“They need to be affirmed,” said Miranda, son of a lumber mill laborer and a cleaning lady who also cooked in a school cafeteria. “All the other kids are going to bypass them. They’re like tools around here.”

He isn’t just making small talk with the help. By reaching out to the workers, he’s doing the job he came here to do--establish human links between the ivory tower and the ethnic community that surrounds it.

“The university is within four walls, and the community doesn’t even know it’s here,” Miranda told me Wednesday before a reception introducing him to Orange County academic, religious and community leaders. “The church is within four walls and the community is going to pot.”

Miranda, 63, recently was named director of the new Center for Urban Studies and Ethnic Leadership at Vanguard, a campus operated by the Assemblies of God Church. He is the top Latino official within the charismatic Protestant denomination of 1.6 million members, the first to sit on its 15-member national board based in Springfield, Mo.

A Church Trailblazer

Normally low-key, Miranda manages to remain modest even as he dubs himself a trailblazer in his church: “The first this and the token that.” In October 1997, he was the only Latino to formally address the mass rally in Washington by the Promise Keepers, a grass-roots religious movement of men stressing family commitments.

Most importantly, Miranda has helped lead the dramatic expansion of his church among traditionally Catholic Latinos in the United States. Latinos account for 15% of its membership but 40% of its growth within the last two decades.

“You take away Hispanics, and Assemblies of God is a declining denomination,” he said.

As a West Coast superintendent from 1984 to 1992, he saw the number of Latino congregations in his region double from 200 to 400. Now as national executive presbyter, he oversees 3,000 churches in eight Latino districts coast to coast.

Assemblies of God churches now are ubiquitous in cities such as Santa Ana, occupying old movie theaters or small storefronts, much like the one where Miranda got his start as a preacher in his home state of New Mexico. They are part of a Protestant boom over the last 30 years in Latino communities from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro.

It’s a giant leap from the days when Miranda was a student and textbooks dismissed the estimated 100,000 Mexican American Protestants as “quantitatively insignificant . . . and not worth much special attention.”

He still bristles at the passage. In the United States, Latino evangelicals now number 8 million.

“I was brought up through that explosion, and I saw it coming as I traveled through Latin America,” said Miranda, who recruited new Spanish-speaking preachers south of the border.

Miranda was there in 1989 when televangelist Jimmy Swaggert, his denomination’s most famous preacher, passionately addressed a throng of 100,000 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Not long afterward, he was there when the church decided to discipline the disgraced Swaggert for his widely reported sexual indiscretion.

The scandal didn’t shake Miranda’s faith. Soon, however, he would witness another national news event that radically altered his view of the church’s role in society.

In April 1992, he was returning home to Southern California from Stanford University, where he had delivered a lecture. From the sky, he saw an almost apocalyptic vision--Los Angeles in flames. But it wasn’t a mystical hallucination. His plane descended through real billows of smoke, the signals of racial rage in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdicts.

The L.A. riots forced him to rethink his mission as a minister: “Wow, here I am in the ivory tower talking religion, and look at the community on fire!”

Miranda quit the church administration he had served for 20 years. He was convinced a new approach to religion was needed, one that connected the church to the community. His new role: Prepare new preachers for the challenge of urban ministries.

Before the year was out, Miranda was appointed dean of Urban and Ethnic Affairs at the Haggard Graduate School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University, a Christian campus east of Pasadena. He became known as a bridge-builder for his ecumenical efforts, reaching out to other denominations across the ideological divide.

Two years later, he launched the National Alliance of Evangelical Ministries, known by its Spanish acronym, AMEN. It was the first national organization for Latino evangelicals, encompassing 27 denominations with 10 million members in Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the United States.

Said Miranda at the time: “Ours is a civic spirituality, demonstrating divine grace on Sunday and good works on Monday.”

Product of Mixed Home

Miranda likes to claim he comes from a mixed home. His father was born in Mexico, a Catholic who liked small corn tortillas. His mother was a native New Mexican and a mainline Methodist who preferred the larger kind, made of flour.

He was born during the Depression, the second of five children. As eldest son, he was named Jesus just like his father. But after his first day of school, he came home to announce that his name had changed to Jesse.

“The principal says he’s not going to call me the name of our Lord,” Miranda informed his parents, who let it be.

Miranda says he got his work ethic from his father, a punctual man who took pride in the precision slicing of tree trunks at the same lumber mill for 50 years. From his mother, Emma, he learned to love God and respect the dignity of even the humblest, unskilled worker.

But he rebelled against his home’s traditional religions, challenging both parents.

“You know, Dad, Catholics don’t even open the Bible.”

“Mom, are you reaching out to the poor? All your bishops are Anglo.”

The roots of his Pentecostal conversion came early. He was 6 when he remembers local evangelicals knocking on his door one day while his mother was ill with double pneumonia. They were allowed in to pray, and Mom was quickly cured as they had promised. That miracle impressed a boy who missed his mother’s cooking.

At 17, he left home to attend Bible school in El Paso. The summer after his second year, he was handed his first assignment, a trial by fire as pastor of a new church opened briefly in a neighboring barrio called Dogtown.

“We rented a place between a bar and a dance hall, and there was my church,” recalled Miranda with a chuckle. “I had 10 little old ladies and 20 kids.”

By the time he turned 20, Miranda was appointed permanent pastor of an established Assemblies of God parish in Chama, a fishing village of 1,600 residents in northern New Mexico. By then, he had married his wife and lifelong companion, Susan Benavidez, with whom he had three children.

In fall 1959, the couple moved to Southern California with their firstborn, named Jesse III and now known as Pastor Jack to a La Mirada congregation that includes his parents.

In California, the elder Miranda undertook the long climb to higher education. He started with a bachelor’s degree from Vanguard, then called Southern California College, situated among orchards in what was then rural Orange County. He eventually earned two master’s degrees, including one in school administration from Cal State Fullerton.

In 1979, at age 42, Miranda was a awarded his doctorate in ministry from the prestigious Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. He had come a long way from the barrio kid who dropped out of high school and thought “college is a campus where you watch football games from a tree above the stadium.”

During the last eight years, since those riots brought him back to earth, Miranda has ushered into the world 65 graduates with master’s degrees in pastoral studies. They are, he says, the new breed, trained to get out from behind the pulpit to address the worldly problems of their flock.

Miranda intends to do the same in Latino communities around his new campus. In Costa Mesa, for example, he plans to work with Maria Elena Avila, a businesswoman involved with redevelopment plans on the heavily Latino west side.

“My hope and my prayer is that Costa Mesa will be a model for how churches can reach out to their communities, to serve and to make a difference,” said Avila, who has admired Miranda for 25 years and considers him a friend and mentor. “Jesse was the missing link to help us really organize.”