At a brawny 6 feet 6 inches and 255 pounds, 36-year-old Danny Egipciaco looks more like a linebacker for the Miami Dolphins than a North American Mission Board (NAMB) national missionary and church planter.
The challenge of spreading the gospel in the Miami metro area is immense because by all accounts, local lostness is vast. According to Egipciaco, Miami — with its 5 million people — is one of the most unchurched cities in the United States. About 95 percent of Miamians are unchurched, Egipciaco said.
Egipciaco lives in nearby Hialeah with his wife, Karina, and their three children, Daniel Jr., Elyse and Brianna. A fourth child is on the way.
Egipciaco, who moved to Miami at age 4, grew up in a Christian home, attending a Spanish-speaking Hispanic Southern Baptist church. He accepted Christ as a teen under the influence of his mom, a native Cuban who was led to Christ as a girl by a Home Mission Board (now NAMB) missionary.
Egipciaco was serving as a 28-year-old youth pastor in a “legacy” first-generation, Spanish-speaking Southern Baptist church when he realized it just wasn’t working.
“I had to change everything,” he recalled. “We were doing church in Spanish, but instead we needed to connect with the growing second-generation Hispanics in south Florida who spoke English. Second-gen Hispanics is one of the fastest growing people groups in south Florida and the U.S.”
Longtime church-planting missionary Al Fernandez, now director of the Florida Baptist Convention’s Urban Impact Ministries, offered advice to young Egipciaco.
“Al had already planted a second-generation, English-speaking Hispanic church, and he shared his wisdom, ideas and experience with me,” Egipciaco said. “Thirty days later, I left the youth ministry, started preaching in a local hotel and became a church planter.” That was 2005.
Today Fernandez and Egipciaco mentor and coach 30-plus church planters in the Miami area, many of whom are bivocational pastors and even some laymen.
Miamians who use Spanish as their first language make up 67 percent of the population. But some 180 languages are spoken in south Florida public schools.
“Many people in Miami — especially the second-generation Hispanics — just don’t think about religion, including Christianity,” Fernandez said. “It’s not on their radar screens. Miami is a very materialistic place — a bling-bling kind of place. People are always chasing the almighty dollar. It’s also a fast-paced, time-consuming environment.
“Conversely some of the first-generation Hispanics who come here exist in survival mode, working two or three jobs just to survive,” he said.
“Miami has a lot of Cuban-based Santeria or Voodoo.”
Up until his appointment by NAMB as a national missionary in 2009, Egipciaco was the first and only pastor of Relevant Church, which he helped plant in 2006 and was running 120 weekly attendees when he left six months ago.
At Relevant Church, he never took a salary. He was not merely a bivocational pastor; he was a “trivocational” pastor, holding down as many as three jobs at a time to support his family.
Egipciaco believes the real future of church planting in south Florida is the second-generation, English-speaking Hispanics.
“What unites church planting in south Florida is the English-speaking people. When we plant an English-speaking church, it draws many Hispanic people groups to join. … So our church plants tend to become very multicultural and diverse.
“Within a one-mile radius of my church, there are 30,000 people. Within a three-mile radius, there are 80,000 people. … We have only three Southern Baptist churches in a three-mile area.
“In West Palm Beach, there are 1 million lost people,” Egipciaco continued. “We’d need 100 churches that would each hold 10,000 to reach them. … We need more churches, not less.”
Help is on the way. Miami is one of 29 major North American cities included in NAMB’s Send North America evangelistic church-planting strategy. Send North America: Miami is scheduled to come online in February.
“Danny and I are excited about partnering with other churches from other parts of the country to plant new churches in the Miami area,” Fernandez said. “We need their resources and their missions teams.
“We have five years of church planting already under our belts. So it’s great timing for Send North America: Miami — God’s timing.”
(NAMB)
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