In Alabama, a Church Sees Its Latino Brethren Vanish

Reporting from Tallassee, Ala.?

The small group, six Mexican men and a woman from Guatemala, sang No. 619 in the hymnal with a force that belied their number:

"Alabad a Jehova! Naciones todas, pueblos todos ?"

Praise God! All nations, all people ...

They had come this Sunday morning to pray, as they always do, at Riverside Heights Baptist Church, out beyond Rosehill Cemetery, where the graves of Civil War dead are marked with tattered Confederate flags.

Victoria Pajaro banged out a piano accompaniment in the vigorous style that Southern Baptist missionary women had taught her years ago in Colombia. After a Bible reading, a pastor named William Robles, speaking in Spanish, abruptly mentioned the state's new immigration law, which requires that police check the residency status of suspected illegal immigrants.

We cannot assume that the whites who supported the law are bigots, he told the congregation. Only God knows the content of their hearts.

In an hour, the sanctuary would fill with the church's white members, nearly all of them conservatives and most supporters of Republican Gov. Robert J. Bentley, the Southern Baptist deacon who championed the law as the nation's toughest after signing it in September.

For more than a decade, however, the white Southern Baptists in this small country church have opened their doors, wallets and hearts to a group of Latino strangers who appeared among them suddenly one Sunday, desperate for a place to pray.

They hired a bilingual pastor, launched a countywide "Hispanic mission," and let their children play side by side with the newcomers' kids on field trips and in summer camps. They knew or suspected that many of them were here illegally.

Now, since the law's passage, the Latinos are moving away. And in the pine pews of Riverside Heights Baptist Church, many white members are struggling to reconcile strongly held convictions about a lawful society with their compassion for their new brothers and sisters in Christ.

Pastor Randy Billingsley is among those who support the Latino mission as staunchly they do the law that is thinning its ranks.

To Billingsley, a retired Air Force master sergeant, illegal immigration poses a national security threat. At the same time, he said, "They're humans. We want to minister to them regardless of what legal status they have."

***

The rhythms of Sunday morning are different than they were a decade ago, with Sanchezes and Lopezes among the Bentons and Ransoms and Rigsbys, and a schedule shaped by a desire for fellowship and the hard reality of the language barrier.

The Spanish-language service is at 9:30 a.m. in an old meeting room. English-language church is at 11 a.m. in the main sanctuary. Only the children are thrown together for Sunday school: the Latino kids, in day care or enrolled in public schools, are usually fluent in English, or close to it.

Alejandro Pajaro, Victoria's bilingual husband, has preached to the English side on special occasions. Billingsley has preached at the Spanish service, with Alejandro translating.

Both whites and Latinos are baptized in the same industrial-sized tub, built into the wall above the altar behind a low plexiglass partition. Sometimes, the newly baptized emerge from the water to the sight of white and brown people in the pews below, clapping and shouting, uproariously, as one.

The church has hosted classes in English as a second language for the Latinos and Spanish classes for the whites, but the lessons haven't really stuck. So the members try to make do.

Once a month, JoAnn Johnston's Sunday school class invites the two groups to a big country breakfast. She bakes the homemade biscuits. Tommy Graham, an avid hunter, brings venison sausage, and James Benton cooks it. Gloria Lowery makes the coffee and grits.

Source: http://lat.ms/voheGo

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