The swirling, wind-driven dust stains the sky like a sallow bruise. Yet Aaron "Rudy" Fraire seems oblivious to the coarse, overwhelming pall, humming the tune of a song he penned while he works alongside a group of men who, for the most part, are strangers.

"I feel honored having all my brothers here," the evangelist and pastor says, standing in a narrow hallway inside a Lutheran orphanage.

He then peers out the doorway across the rutted dirt roads of the squatter village of Anapra on the fringes of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and says: "We are united in Christ. We all swallow the same dust and dig it out of our ears. But I am honored because my fellow workers all have a giving heart that motivates me to continue moving forward."

Smiling, he turns to the group of men bowing their heads as a Spanish-speaking pastor blesses an unlikely meal of Mexican rice, beans, corn tortillas, tuna casserole, punch, and chocolate SnackWells spread out across four eight-foot folding tables.

Linking congregations
In this tense Southwest border region, Fraire is among a growing number of Latino and Anglo pastors who are keenly aware that political and economic boundaries between Mexico and the United States are undercutting the work of the church. A new organization, Casas por Cristo, based in El Paso, has developed a program to link Latino and Anglo congregations through building houses for the poor around Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso.

As their noontime meal begins, silence passes quickly as 12 pastors or religious administrators from El Paso and six pastors from Juarez, all of various denominations, begin to communicate.

Some of the men speak in broken, little-used phrases of high-school Spanish, and the others in English learned mainly from American top-40 radio stations and television, whose signals bleed across the U.S.-Mexico border.

These men, most of whom sport facial masks to filter the strafing dust as they work, have joined in an effort to build a new home in this village where potable water is hard to come by and electricity is stolen from power lines with "diablitos"—thin copper wiring so called because the "little devils" often catch fire.

The busy religious leaders, who cannot often participate in hands-on efforts, may be building a two-room home for an Anapra family with 11 children now living in a cardboard-and-wood pallet shanty. But they are all conscious that the construction project is only a foundation for building longer-lasting and more powerful cross-border relations.

"We're building a home, that's true," says Barney Field, head of El Paso for Jesus. "But we're also building a bridge between the two countries that we hope will benefit many, many people."

The group members soon discover how much they have in common as they exchange E-mail addresses or comment on the quality of sermons on the "Best of the Christian Web."

As orphaned children scurry between and under the tables, some of the men carefully dab half a spoonful of a red chile salsa onto their beans. Faces contort, and laughter erupts from Mexican pastors who bite off mouthfuls of jalapeños as they mix the tuna casserole with rice in a rolled-up tortilla.

Without hesitating, Rix Tillman, senior pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in El Paso, enlists Fraire in an impromptu rendition of a Spanish song often offered as a prayer to Jesus Christ.

Tillman leads off in a heavily accented Spanish, but he is quickly outdone by Fraire, who recently recorded a cassette tape of eight Mexican-style religious songs he penned and dedicated to his wife and children. Fraire, pastor of Centro Cristiano Bethesda in Juarez, puts his arm around Tillman and thanks him for the duet. "The house we're building is the end product of our labor, but everything else, like the singing and brotherhood, is the important part," says Tillman, now thanking a group of five women who prepared the meal.

More than home building
Casas por Cristo, a nonprofit organization run by Wesley Bell, uses a network of Juarez-area pastors to find the families, who must own the property on which the homes will be built.

"These men run churches and inspire members of their congregations and communities, but today they are little more than workers with one common goal—building a house," Bell says.

"We just brought them together, but they have goals as individuals and as a group that Casas por Cristo, hopefully, helped move along."

It is not yet noon in El Paso, but across the border in Anapra, less than a quarter-mile from the Rio Grande, the pastors and religious leaders are back atop the low-lying hill where they are building the garage-sized home.

As the punishing dust storm continues, they cannot see the ornate towers of the Bhutanese-style building of the University of Texas at El Paso or the mountains in Juarez where the massive words La Biblia Es La Verdad, Leela ("The Bible Is the Truth, Read It") have been whitewashed onto its side.

Indeed, reading the Bible is a vocation for these leaders. But it has now become a passionate crusade. Under the direction of Pastors for Jesus and in cooperation with the Bible Society, more than 70 pastors—from Lutherans to Baptists and Catholic priests—have joined together to promote the reading of the Bible. Since January, the pastors have been working to get people throughout the world to commit to reading the New Testament in one year. They ask that individuals, families, or friends sit for five minutes a day and read the Bible.

The project, called "1997: The Year of the Bible," is visible throughout El Paso and Juarez as billboards proclaiming Bible reading dot the highways and centers of the cities. To promote and support the effort, Bible passages appear every Sunday in newspapers and other periodicals throughout the region.

The cross-border efforts continued in May when Argentina-born Luis Palau came to Juarez for a five-day crusade and two-day Spanish-language rally, followed by a five-day crusade in El Paso.

Near the close of the workday, as the wind pulls insulation from the hands of those working around him, Juarez pastor Galdino Loaeza of Iglesia Bautista Betrean rests for a moment on a large toolbox. "It was 82 degrees yesterday, and now look around at how it looks like winter," says Loaeza, grabbing a hammer tightly as he begins pounding nails into a two-by-four.

"But this that we are doing, what's happening, not just building the house, but bringing religions, pastors, and people together, is a beautiful thing. What comes next is really the miracle."

Originally published in Christiantiy Today, August 11, 1997.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christianity Today magazine.
For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail cteditor@christianitytoday.com.

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