2023 was a hard year for churches and the Revs. Hector Aguilar and Mike Atkins say churches should become more assertive and bring their influence to bear on the American culture in the New Year rather than letting that culture influence them.
“A lot of churches are still trying to recover from COVID and they’re encouraging people to come back,” said the Rev. Aguilar, a former Odessan who is now pastor of the First Baptist Church of Anthony northeast of El Paso. “We should have a mission of not just building up our congregations but also of having an impact in our communities for Christ.
“All churches need to be more evangelistic and reach out with the good news of Jesus Christ.”
Aguilar said America has lost sight of values and morals as its people became more self-centered and less spiritual.
“We should return to the basics of the Bible and make a bigger impact on the hostile American culture instead of allowing that culture to impact the churches,” he said. “We must pursue love, compassion and mercy instead of abortion, same-sex marriage and evolutionism because the public schools don’t teach that God made the world.
“They teach that the world was created in some other way.”
The Rev. Atkins, pastor of Kingston Avenue Baptist Church, said his church “is mainly looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish as far as outreach to get more young people involved.
“That’s going to be our big push for the New Year,” Atkins said. “We had some problems with COVID, as all churches did, and we want to be more involved in the schools and community.
“We’ll reach out to families and be more of a voice in the community than we have been.”
Atkins said people grew more self-absorbed during the pandemic and less interested in religion.
“A lot of people have become satisfied with what they have and God doesn’t have an important role in their lives,” he said. “They don’t want anybody telling them what to do because they don’t feel like they need anybody or anything.
“They say, ‘We don’t want a relationship with the Lord because we don’t care about the next person.’ They’re satisfied with the way things are rolling along.”
Atkins said the United States must address the problems it has at home rather than spending so much money to support other countries.
“There is a lot of discussion about helping Israel and helping Ukraine and yes, we should help them, but we shouldn’t be throwing billions of dollars at things that really don’t affect us because we end up leaving our own people desperate,” he said. “We need to take care of the problems we have in our own society.”
