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TIME Magazine Writer Speaks About "The Rise of Evangelicos"

August 1, 2014

TIME Magazine reporter Elizabeth Dias recalled seeing signs by the side of the road near her apartment in Virginia.

She couldn’t determine why so many of them were there.

But, she says, seeing one after the other, she began to realize they advertized different Hispanic churches.

Dias said she ended up attending some of the churches and then listening to church members tell their stories and stories about their churches.

“The growth of these churches has been exponential,” Dias says on a video recording in which she speaks to John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.

Out of that initial experience of meeting church members near her home, says Dias, she went on the road to Chicago, where she attended the New Life Covenant Church, which has about 17,000 members attending each service, and publishing a TIME cover story "The Rise of Evangélicos" published in April 2013.

Her article, says the Calvin website, signaled a "Latino Reformation" in the U.S. and provided an in-depth look "inside the new Hispanics churches transforming religion in America."

Dias says she had the goal of helping to define an important issue — the growth of the Hispanic church when that growth was under the radar of many.

“Many of the churches I have visited had 300 or 400 members. When you approach the service from outside, it doesn’t look like there are that many people. There are no full parking lots,” says Dias.

But, she says on the recording, compare those numbers to the average size of white congregations: Somewhere about 100.

Here are the questions Witvliet asked Dias:

  • Reflect on your journey to TIME. How does someone from Phoenix, Arizona, educated at Wheaton College and Princeton Seminary, wind up doing religion reporting at TIME magazine?
  • Tell us how this cover story came to be.
  • Tell us more: What shapes your reporting instincts? How do you know it’s a national story?
  • Is there a signature story that represents the main story line of the project?
  • Talk about the dynamics of mega and micro churches and how this story is shaped by church size and location.
  • What influence and shape has television ministry and social media made?
  • What are your impressions of regional, ethnic, and cultural diversity as they relate to the story?
  • What have been the responses and reactions to the story?
  • In the larger ecology of North American Christianity, as a journalist how would you challenge scholars and academics who research and write about Latino Protestant congregations?
  • Talk about the role journalists play in relationship to pastoral ministry and to those people—pastors and others in leadership—who are consumers of journalistic writing.

For related Protestant Latino worship projects sponsored by the Worship Institute, see our Protestant Latino Worship Practices Resource Guide.

Interview with Elizabeth Dias from Calvin Worship Institute on Vimeo.