Texas Becomes a Majority-Minority State: A Call for New Wineskins
By Oliver R. Phillips

What demographers have predicted for so long is becoming reality. This past week Texas became the fourth state to become a majority-minority state. According to the population estimates on the 2000 Census, about 50.2 percent of Texans are now minorities. Texas now joins California, New Mexico and Hawaii with majority-minority populations – with Hispanics the largest group in every state except Hawaii, where it is Asian-Americans.

For the evangelical community, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity. It is a challenge because the long-held methodologies are being called into question as to their effectiveness. Public policy analysts and lawmakers are busy reevaluating strategies to abort a possible “ghettoization” situation. Ardently at work are those in control who understand quite well that to ignore the changing human landscape is to allow ethnic polarization that could only ferment into an undue strain on the social fabric of the state.

Business as usual cannot be the mantra for the future. This new majority will impinge on every aspect of Texan life. Like a new metal to the demographic alloy, business and commerce, education and technology, food and lifestyle, will all be affected by the tentacles of change. However, the religious community is in no way immunized from this challenge. How it responds to this change would undoubtedly determine its relevance, and subsequently, its existence.

As the new migrants develop a powerful sense of national identity, the dual citizenship option is a potential gadfly in the ointment. These hybrid citizens will continue to hold an allegiance to their homeland and Evangelicals must be aware of this. To attempt to wrench them for every tenet of their “preferred culture” is to be disingenuous to the very cause of Christ. The Church must provide an ecclesial atmosphere that is welcoming without being disarming.

The opportunity for the Christian community to be a need-based oriented organism of hospitality is, or ought to be, at the core of its raison d’etre. To be sure, the temptation on the part of the dominant culture Evangelicals would be to Americanize the new respondents to the claims of the Gospel. This would be a gross mistake.

Texas, as all the other states who would become majority-minority states, must explore new templates of socialization. So must the church community!

The time is now for the Church of the Nazarene to aggressively reevaluate its approach to the new day that is upon us. New churches would be started in many corners of the US and Canada as we move relentlessly toward the centennial celebrations. If these congregations ignore the changing kaleidoscopic landscape they would become mere repositories for irrelevant religion and opaque institutions of barren clichés.

The Gospel culture must be shaped by the culture into which it is deposited without sacrificing its salient message of hope and its efficacious claim to a Christocentric origin. Only by a willingness to permit the new wine of hope to ferment in the new wineskins of expediency and opportunity could the church be guaranteed a future that is inclusive and transforming.