09/16/2025
This article by ELIM's Director was published last Thursday on Fellowship Southwest's Newsletter.
CONTROVERSIAL MINISTRIES?
Nearly twenty-five years ago, I was pastoring a small Hispanic church in central Texas. We were only a handful of believers, but we felt a strong calling to engage in ministry that would connect us deeply with the community around us.
That journey led me to meet Pastor Alex Camacho in McKinney, Texas, who was leading a legal services ministry for immigrants. Meeting him and witnessing his ministry in action was like being shaken awake by God Himself. I could almost hear the words echoing in my heart: “Open your eyes and see what is happening here in McKinney.”
The experience reminded me of something I had read a decade earlier in "Experiencing God" by Henry Blackaby: When you clearly see God at work around you, take it as an invitation to join Him in service. That invitation was clear and powerful. My wife and I aligned our lives to that calling, and in time it became evident that we were meant to serve the immigrant population in Texas.
In the fall of 2007, we launched Baptist Immigration Services of Brownwood. By late summer, we had received official recognition and accreditation from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals. With the full backing of our dear friend and mentor, Dr. Don Fawcett, then Executive Director of the Heart of Texas Baptist Network, we opened our doors.
At the time, I was also a full-time university professor, so doing ministry among immigrants meant significant sacrifice. For a couple of years, we served many families, most of them Hispanic, until God called us to serve at the Baptist University of the Américas in San Antonio.
During those years, I once shared with a fellow pastor about the work we were doing. He listened attentively, with a worried face, and then asked me, “Jesús, why are you always involved in such controversial ministries?” At first, I laughed. But in the days that followed, his words unsettled me.
Is ministering to immigrants “controversial”? His comment, though well-intentioned, seemed to assume that pastors should avoid involvement in areas marked by sociopolitical tension. But is there really such a boundary—a safe line separating “controversial” ministry from “comfortable” and “secure” ministry? And if so, should pastors remain only in that safety zone?
Over time, I have come to see that ministries of so-called “social justice” are indeed controversial in North American evangelical culture. Personally, I find myself aligned with theologian Stanley Grenz, who argued that the gospel, as articulated in Scripture, is explicitly social, and the church’s involvement in social action is an extension of Jesus’ own ministry (His "Theology for the Community of God" should be required reading for all believers).
Jesus Himself proclaimed in the synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19, NIV).
The heart of the gospel is that Jesus is King, and His kingdom breaks into this world through acts of service. Later, in John’s Gospel, Jesus tells His followers that they will not only continue His works but even do “greater things.”
That is why immigrant ministry, complex and multifaceted as it is, belongs alongside other vital ministries: to prisoners, to orphans in children’s homes, to those needing medical care or therapeutic counseling. These are all ways the love of Christ takes flesh in the world and brings tangible benefit to society.
Theologian Matthew Bates, in his book "Beyond the Salvation" Wars, warns that denying the connection between evangelism and social service reduces the gospel to a one-dimensional message, what he calls a “heavenly cul-de-sac,” as though human beings existed only in a spiritual realm and not in the reality of this world.
Those of us involved in immigration ministry do not live in a heavenly cul-de-sac. We live here in this world as citizens of God’s kingdom.
In spite of our many shortcomings we strive to respond in obedience to the biblical gospel—a gospel that is explicitly social, expressed in service to our neighbor. Doing so in kingdom work, a way in which heaven permeates everything in the neighborhood.
