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WHDL - 00014545

Listening to Strangers: An Ethnographic Approach to Hearing Nazarene Latinx Immigrant Pastors in the US Heartland

Timothy Edward McKeithen

William Broadhurst Library at Nazarene Theological Seminary

Resource Types

Academic (Thesis, Dissertation, Etc.)

Resource Languages

English

Institutional Repository

Description / Abstract

Thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants have moved into the rural towns of the U.S. Heartland, eschewing the metropolitan Latinx communities of West and East Coasts to settle in the central farming regions. Because of language and cultural barriers, these Spanish-speaking persons find themselves as outsiders, even after several years here. While this is true in the communities where they live, it is more troubling that it is true in the church. Latinx immigrant pastors struggle to be included. They need mentorship and resources. This project seeks to sensitize the Church of the Nazarene to the experiences of the Latinx pastors in this region by presenting both historical, contextual and qualitative data. Analyzing these, several themes emerged and included finding a mutual distrust that was created by centuries of propaganda by both sides. Ethnographic interviews and grounded theory analysis revealed that these pastors feel isolated, rejected, overwhelmed and disconnected.