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New immigrants are coming into America, legally and illegally, at the rate of 125,000 a month. If this trend continues, by the end of the decade, the immigrant portion of the U.S. population will exceed 14.8 percent, the historic high recorded in 1890.

Missions consultant Arturo Lucero, president of Multi-Cultural Ministries, Victorville, California, said church-based outreach to new immigrants and their families has become the number one priority for many American evangelicals. He told Christianity Today that American cities and towns are undergoing an "explosion of immigrants, refugees, and changed lives."

"Jesus gave the church two mandates: evangelize all peoples and love all peoples. The peoples are here, and we need to follow Jesus even if we have to move beyond our ethnic comfort zones."

New immigrants are very needy. On average, they are poorer and depend on welfare more than native-born families. The heads of immigrant households often have little formal education. Employers frequently pay them lower wages than other U.S. heads of households. New immigrants living in poor neighborhoods are also more likely than natives to become crime victims. Aware of the risks, new immigrants may arrive with the address of a church in their pockets.

New immigrants have fanned out across the nation. But about 60 percent of the nation's 33 million immigrants live in one of ten large metro areas, such as New York, Miami, Chicago, or Los Angeles. The metro area of Los Angeles alone has 5.1 million immigrants and California takes the prize as having the greatest immigrant population of any state (9.1 million). Jon Miller of the University of Southern California Center of Religion and Civic Culture says, "Los Angeles is the new landing spot for the mission movement that started in the nineteenth century."

In greater Los Angeles, ethnic evangelicals are responding to this new mission field outside their front doors because new immigrants no longer limit themselves to culturally similar churches. Christianity Today recently visited three southern California churches, where outreach to new immigrants is thriving: Victory Outreach, Calvary Chapel, and Evergreen Baptist.

Obed's family emigrated from Mexico when he was a toddler. His neighborhood in the west side of Pasadena is a gang stronghold. A member of the Southern United La Raza, a violent gang in the region, recruited Obed when the youth became a teen. Gang members provide group identity, protection, and a lifestyle to immigrant teens, often culturally isolated at school. And, if the teens don't join, gang members threaten them with a beating.

After joining, Obed went to a tattoo artist and had the gang's symbols inked onto his cheeks: an X beside one eye and a 13 by the other. Gang involvement absorbed Obed's every waking moment. Obed believed he could "cast death" with a hateful glance. "If anybody would look at me wrong, I would get them," he said. "I put evil spirits in my home."

His parents were horrified. They got a court order prohibiting him from talking with family members. They nailed shut his bedroom door and allowed him to enter the house only through his bedroom window.

The Los Angeles area has some of the nation's most violent gangs. In one week in November 2002, 20 people died in gang warfare. "To die gang," Obed said, was his dream. "My last days, I thought I would go get a gun, kill somebody and be shot or kill myself. Then I woke up sweating and had this thought put into my mind, You need to change your life around."

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February 2003, Vol. 47, No. 2