Of Borders and Margins

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) lives in an uneasy and tension-filled relationship with its Hispanic constituency. In this engagingly written work, Daisy L. Machado locates the historical underpinnings of this relationship through an analysis of the Disciples' interaction with Hispanics in Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Machado shows that, while there was a large Hispanic population in the state during this period, the Christian Church was not able to develop a significant presence in Hispanic communities. Much of this failure can be traced, she argues, to the notion of the frontier, which influenced and shaped both church policy and theology for Disciples ministering to the Hispanic community. The result was the creation of a small Hispanic church in Texas that is still struggling to be self-supporting, and has no Mexican-American ministers. It is a church that exists on both the geographical and denominational margins of the Christian Church.