NPR

Some Christian Leaders Say Deportations Would Jeopardize Their Churches

Young worshippers at Erez Baptist Church in Duncanville, Texas, gather for a midweek music service. The congregation, less than a year old, consists almost entirely of Hispanic immigrants and their children.

Both the challenges and opportunities of U.S. Christianity are evident at Fairmeadows Baptist Church in Duncanville, Texas, just south of Dallas.

On some Sundays, services at the church draw as few as a dozen worshippers, most of them white.

For the past year, however, the church has also been home to a largely Hispanic tenant congregation that calls itself Erez Baptist, and in that incarnation the church is thriving. The average Sunday attendance is around 80, and the congregation has a youth music group and already sponsors a missionary in Brazil.

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