From the Washington Times-
The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church was in town this past weekend visiting a Hispanic congregation in Hyattsville.
San Mateo, also known as St. Matthew's, is the largest - at 300 members - of the seven Spanish-speaking congregations in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. What the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori was looking at was the future of her denomination.
She said as much when I talked with her at the fiesta afterward. Membership in the mainline Protestant denominations is dropping like a stone - especially in the Episcopal Church, which is perilously close to dropping below the 2 million mark. The nation's 68 million Catholics would be losing folks, too, she noted, were it not for immigration.
About 30 million of these Catholics - half of them younger than 25 - are Hispanic.
"Why do we have to speak their language?" an older woman asked me as we ate tamales and papusas on folding chairs in the parish hall. "People who came here years ago, they learned to speak English."
Well, so they did - folks like my German grandfather who arrived in 1903. But the race for bodies to fill the pews has ramped up a bit since then and the mentality now is to rope them in with services in Spanish, Vietnamese, Hmong, Russian and other tongues. Hopefully, a generation from now, their English-speaking kids will stick around the church that was there for them.
More here-
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/29/churches-ride-immigration-wave/
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