PROTESTANTISM EN ESPANOL

Joselid Lozano didn't have any trouble finding native Spanish speakers in Southeast Missouri once he started looking for them.

By eating meals at area Mexican restaurants, talking to other Spanish speakers and searching through the telephone listings, Lozano found more Hispanics in Cape Girardeau County than one might expect.

These Spanish speakers are living in the area permanently, not arriving as migrant workers in the summers as laborers on farms and orchards.

There are at least 100 families, primarily from Mexico, living in the Cape Girardeau and Jackson, Mo., area, Lozano said. "You can see more Spanish faces on the street and in the supermarket and realize that the Spanish population is growing."

Lozano and his family moved from Bogota, Colombia, to work as Southern Baptist missionaries with the Hispanic population in the county. Their work is sponsored by the First Baptist Church of Millersville, Mo., the Cape Girardeau Baptist Association, Charleston Baptist Association and other churches in the Bootheel area.

Lozano said he knows that God sent him to the area because it wasn't what he'd originally planned. Lozano first thought about working among the Hispanics in California but then talked to missionary friends working in Mountain View, Mo. From those friends, he learned more about the work in Cape Girardeau County.

For the past five months, the Lozanos have been gathering with up to 25 other Spanish speakers each Sunday morning for worship in the basement of the Cape Girardeau Baptist Association office on Old Cape Road.

The same scene is repeated across the nation every Sunday.

The sounds of a spirited Bible study spill down the hall inside a building converted into a church in Liberal, Kan., where a lay leader stands beside a picture depicting the Last Judgment and asks the 19 people in the congregation to share readings and insights from the New Testament.

After the study, there's music, and then prayer for a group of missionaries preparing for a trip to Mexico. At this church, the readings come from "Colosenses" and "Efesios," not "Colossians" and "Ephesians."

The music evokes not the sedate 17th-century spirit of hymnwriter Isaac Watts, but the uptempo bounce of a Cinco de Mayo fiesta. And the missionaries, by and large, are headed back to the land of their birth.

Iglesia Bautista Nueva Vida Spanish for "New Life Baptist Church" the Baptist group in Cape Girardeau and others like them represent a growing Protestant population among the traditionally Roman Catholic Hispanic immigrants to the United States.

It's a religious movement that largely goes unnoticed by the general public, adherents say. As the Rev. Jose Gloria, Iglesia Bautista Nueva Vida's pastor, put it:

"People look at me, they see brown and they think Catholic.'"

But the idea that Hispanic equals Catholic is slowly fading, said the Hispanic liaison for the Springfield, Mo.-based Assemblies of God, the nation's largest Pentecostal denomination.

"Ten years ago, I would have said that is the case, but not any more," said Efraim Espinoza, who also pastors a church in Ozark, in southwest Missouri. "You still see it from time to time -- I might get a mailing from the Knights of Columbus -- but not like 10 years ago."

Lozano knows the difficulties in reaching people who are rooted in a Mexican Catholic culture. "It's difficult work because they are very strong believers," he said.

The Census Bureau does not ask questions about religious practices, but most authorities on religion agree that more than 20 percent of Hispanics in the United States -- at least 7 million people out of a Hispanic population of 35.3 million -- belong to evangelical or Pentecostal congregations.

The National Council of Catholic Bishops went well beyond that estimate in a 1999 report, putting it as high as 33 percent. As recently as the mid-1980s, Catholics made up about 90 percent of the Hispanic population.

The growing population of Hispanics in Southeast Missouri has given the area's Baptist churches a new mission opportunity.

When members at First Baptist in Millersville heard Lozano speak and learned of the need for a Hispanic congregation, they supported it completely, said the Rev. Dan Hale, pastor.

Lozano "melted the hearts of the people," Hale said. Members immediately asked to help sponsor the mission and have been supporting the work ever since.

"It's exciting to see what's taken place," he said. There have been 29 conversions since the group began meeting.

Later this summer, plans are for the ministry to extend into the Benton, Mo., area for migrants working there to attend a worship service.

The greatest lessons learned from the work has been that God is "bigger than we ever dreamed," Hale said. "It's challenged us to broaden our focus and see where God is working around us, and He's working in a tremendous way."

Features editor Laura Johnston contributed to this report.

Want to go?

The Hispanic mission church, sponsored by Southern Baptists in Cape Girardeau County, meets at 10:30 a.m. each Sunday at the Cape Girardeau Baptist Association office, 5103 Old Cape Road East.

English as Second Language courses also are offered by volunteers from the First Baptist Church in Millersville, Mo. For information about the next course, call the church office at 243-2480.