Mars Hill Church launches our first multi-language service on Sunday. Starting this week, the 11:15 AM service at our Albuquerque campus will be in English and Spanish (the sermon will include Spanish subtitles). Almost half of the 800,000 living in Albuquerque metro are of Latino origin, and Spanish is the primary language spoken in nearly a third of area households (2000 census). Pastor Dave Bruskas leads our ministry in the Southwest U.S. I asked him to describe the vision for a multi-language church:

Our desire is to be a unified campus that will best serve all people in our city by being bilingual in all we do. We don’t wish to segregate into English and Spanish communities, but instead interact together by overcoming language barriers as we focus on the gospel. We chose our largest gathering of the week (11:15 AM) to underscore how important we believe this priority to be.
Also, by being bilingual in our approach, we can serve immigrants in assimilating into the English-speaking American culture and better serve generations that follow who will likely speak English as a first language.

Mars Hill Albuquerque also offers Spanish-speaking community groups, children’s ministry, and prayer teams, and they hope to have Spanish-speaking Redemption Groups in May. A special Good Friday service in Spanish will take place midday on April 2. As for the future, Pastor Dave says, "We would be delighted to have immigrant families from all of Latin America hear the gospel and grow together with us as we seek to see as many people as possible living for Jesus in our city, state, and region." Find Pastor Jamie on Facebook and Twitter.