Anglican Fever

CBN News has just ran an article and video about the Anglican Church, the drive to plant and multiply congregations, along with the attraction of Anglican Christianity (in Chicago). The article is called Anglican Fever: Youth Flock to New Denomination. Here is a link to the article. The video is below:

Reading Exodus in Advent

By Jonathan Kindberg

Advent is the season of the Church in which we remember Christ’s first coming and look ahead to Christ’s return as King and the coming of his kingdom. During this Advent at Iglesia de la Resurrección we have been reading the book of Exodus in our adult Sunday school class. I didn’t prepare a complex syllabus nor reading plan. Each week we simply gather together, read a chapter and talk about it. Reading Exodus in this way alongside immigrant brothers and sisters and seeing the text through their eyes and lived experience has been a unique privilege. It has allowed me to see Exodus with fresh eyes and gain new insights into the nature of culture, injustice, liberation, pilgrimage and home.

First, we realized that Moses was a pocho. A pocho is a derogatory term used by native-born Mexicans to describe Mexicans born in the United States who have forgotten their culture and heritage and who are usually better off financially than those still in Mexico. When Pochos goes for a visit to Mexico, they often stick out like a sore thumb and find themselves somewhat out of place. They have become Mexican-Americans.

Similarly Moses, though ethnically Hebrew, lived a life of privilege in the palace of the Egpytian princess, was wealthy and likely was culturally very removed from his Israelite relatives who were slaves. Then he spent 40 years additional years in self-imposed exile in a culturally foreign land before being sent by God to return to Egypt by the Lord. No wonder he feared that the Israelites wouldn’t listen to them. He was an outsider. And yet, Pharoah would. He was the perfect man for the job of mediating between the people of Israel and the Egyptian pharaoh. He was a 2nd generation Hebrew leader, an insider-outsider, to both the Israelites and the Egyptians and thus exactly the kind of person to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.

Mexicans born here in the United States, the so called 2nd generation, are often marginalized both within the Mexican cultural world and the white American world. They don’t fit in perfectly with either. They exist in the world of the hyphen, neither fully this nor that. Within the immigrant church led by 1st generation Mexicans they can be marginalized as well. However, they are perfectly suited to mediate both between generations and between immigrants and the American host culture.  They are the leaders of the Hispanic church of the future, and it is key that they be given voice and leadership if the church is to survive past the 1st generation.

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