Rodriguez shared with attendees the NHCLC’s goal to raise $350,000 dollars to properly support the mental health initiative, and later in the event celebrated that over $8,000 had been raised that day. He also said he was donating the proceeds of his new book, “Fresh Oil, Holy Fire, New Wine,” to the mental health initiative.
Rodriguez told RNS that this year’s gathering was historic because of the critical mass of U.S. Latino megachurch pastors who had shown up.
In a devotional at the beginning of the gathering, David Scarpeta, the Spanish lead pastor for Grace Church, a Houston megachurch, urged pastors to be collaborators and not competitors.
“Comparison is an enemy of service. In places like this, our tendency is to compare ourselves,” Scarpeta said in Spanish.
Later in the day, Scarpeta joined a panel of four other megachurch pastors to speak about their churches’ successes. The pastors urged other attendees to remove bureaucracy, to seek mentorship and innovation and to focus on unbelievers.
Josiah Silva, lead pastor of Freedomhouse Church in Orange County, California, which has more than 1,000 weekly attenders, spoke about his church’s recent purchase of a former Walmart next to Disneyland in the center of Anaheim.
“We’re not called just to make bricks for Pharaoh. We’re called to own land,” he said. “We’re not just going to be the ones that are here to clean America. We’re here to own as well,” Silva said to cheers.
Silva told RNS it was important to him to come to Washington for the summit, “to help empower the Latin church in America. A lot of times we’re underserved, looking for support, and the NHCLC has been that for us.”
Even with the presidential election fast approaching — NHCLC leaders expressed support for former President Donald Trump — the election was a minor issue on the main stage of the event.
The tables included voter guides that were created by a coalition between the NHCLC, the Job Creators Network Foundation and Bienvenido highlighting Republican alignment with various evangelical priorities. Issues where NHCLC leadership has historically disagreed with Republicans, like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, were not highlighted.
While the majority (57%) of Latino registered voters say they plan to support Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential contest, 65% of Latino Protestants say they plan to vote for Republican former President Donald Trump.
From the stage, pastors heard from a representative of iVoterGuide, who runs a website “informing and mobilizing voters with biblical values,” and Robert Stearns of Eagles’ Wings, a Christian organization supporting Israel.
Stearns urged pastors to sign a declaration named after Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who opposed Adolf Hitler and was hung by the Nazis, which includes commitments to speak against antisemitism, to advocate “for the security and wellbeing of Israel, as well as a ‘future and a hope’ for the Palestinian people” and criticized protests that have condemned Israel rather than Hamas. He also announced that his organization plans to take 30 NHCLC pastors to Israel in February.
“That giant of antisemitism will come down en el nombre de Jesús,” or “in the name of Jesus,” said the Rev. Tony Suarez, the vice president of the NHCLC.
This article originally appeared here.
