There’s an unglitzy side to Miami you’ll never see depicted on “CSI: Miami.” Sure there’s the flaunted wealth, the big beach-front homes, the flashy cars, the fast boats and glamorous life in the fast lane for the celebrities and superstar athletes who live here.
But Miami is a city of paradoxical extremes. While the city has been ranked the third richest in the United States, it also has more citizens — about a third of the population — below the federal poverty line than any other U.S. city except Detroit and El Paso, Texas. Miami is the seventh-largest metro area in the United States, with more than 5.4 million people.
The son of Cuban immigrants, Southern Baptist missionary Al Fernandez, 50, loves Miami like only a man born and raised there could. As a native, he actually witnessed the start of the huge influx of Cubans, Latinos and other Hispanics into Miami in the early 1960s.
Fernandez’s parents were already planting churches in the Miami area when Cubans began flooding into Miami to escape the Marxist dictatorship of Fidel Castro. He accepted Christ when he was only 6, felt called to the ministry at 15 and now serves as director of the Florida Baptist Convention’s Urban Impact Ministries in Miami.
His work depends on a close partnership among three key associations in south Florida: Palm Lake Baptist Association in the West Palm Beach area, Gulf Stream Baptist Association just north of Miami and Miami Baptist Association in metro Miami. Fernandez has three distinct areas of responsibility: urban church planting, urban leadership development and urban evangelism.
Miami has the largest Spanish-speaking population in the Western Hemisphere outside Latin America. Miamians who use Spanish as their first language make up 67 percent of the population. One might think that would make Fernandez’s job easier, as he is bilingual. But language doesn’t tell the whole story.
“The No. 1 challenge is Miami’s diversity and multiculturalism,” he said, stressing that not all Hispanics are alike because they come to Miami from different nations — Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, etc. “Hispanics from different countries may all speak Spanish but still have different customs, traditions and cultures.”
Miami Association — which will celebrate its centennial in 2009 — is comprised of some 300 churches and missions. About 100 are English-speaking, 100 are Spanish-speaking and 100 speak Creole (Haitian). The balance is Chinese, Russian and Portuguese. Seventy percent do not use English as their first language.
Fernandez believes Miami’s continued growth in Hispanic population and culture foreshadows the way the United States will look in the future.
“What you see in Miami today is what you’re going to see in the rest of this nation in the next 20 years. No matter where you live, it’s coming. So whatever we learn here as Southern Baptists, using Miami as a laboratory, the principles will be the same and will work elsewhere in the country. For instance, there’s a big interest in urban ministries because cities are getting bigger and the outskirts are getting smaller.
“We need to realize that the apostle Paul used a strategy calling for him to stop in big cities because that’s where the most bang for the buck is, where you get the best results,” Fernandez said. “I think as Southern Baptists, we need to change our strategies and understand that in the future, we need to know how to minister and be effective in these large urban settings.” (NAMB)
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