Several years ago, Kenneth Bruce had a burden. He was coaching his kids’ soccer teams, and he was struck by how many Hispanics were playing on his teams and in the rest of the league.

So Bruce — pastor of Westwood Baptist Church in Alabaster — came back and told the leadership at his church that he felt like Westwood needed to start a ministry for Spanish speakers.

Rick Swing, the church’s executive pastor, said they began to pray, and through those prayers, God brought people across their paths who had helped plant Spanish congregations before.

One of those was Brian Harper, church planting strategist for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions.

“We talked to him, and he knew a young man named Juan Aristizabal, and we interviewed him,” Swing said.

Confirmation

In the years before, Aristizabal had been using his vacations to go and serve with church plants in Iowa and Texas. And now he felt like God might be calling him to Alabama, and Swing and the others as Westwood agreed.

“We felt the strong desire that he was the right person, him and his family, to be at our church,” Swing said.

Then he spoke with Ben Hale, evangelism and missions pastor at Dawson Memorial Baptist Church in Birmingham, who shared about their residency program for Hispanic church planters.

“They wanted to invest financially and also through a development strategy where they had one of their church planter pastors help our pastor with a time of preparing and mentoring,” Swing said. “That was such a blessing and confirmation of God’s desire to plant a Westwood Hispanic church.”

Continue reading here.

This article was originally published at TheAlabamaBaptist.org.