The Ever-Changing Evangelical Religion
Interview with Eli Ruiz, a current member of Salem Church
Introduction
When my partner, Brooke, mentioned Salem Church and its once ethnically Norwegian congregation, I was intrigued. I wanted to explore how –and why- a church would adapt so much over a relatively short period of time. As a non-Norwegian member of the church and someone who has seen it grow, Eli was an ideal interviewee. Religion is always a difficult topic to discuss objectively, and the most challenging aspect of the interview was keeping my own religion out of it. I wanted to stay on topic. The Evangelical Free Church website, the Pew report, and informational immigration websites were helpful in my research. They informed me about how the ethnicities of immigrants have changed, where they went, and what religions these new immigrants subscribe to. As the church is a reflection of the ethnic makeup of its neighborhood and city, it makes sense that it would have changed as immigration has changed.
Analysis Abstract
Salem Church was founded by Norwegians, for the Norwegian community in Staten Island. Looking at it today, one would not know that. In the melting pot that New York City, this church has come to represent ethnicities from all over the world. This paper explores the reasons for this change from the perspective of one Eli Ruiz, a member of the congregation for many years. It is clear from his story that in the last few decades, the church has worked to be welcoming to the changing community of Staten Island. Mr. Ruiz, from Puerto Rico and a minister himself, was inspired enough to join. He has witnessed the methods of many Spanish churches to keep the services in Spanish, and says that this is a problem that Salem Church has overcome; they are more successful for it. It is not about the language, Eli insists, but people and God.
Analysis: A Perspective from Puerto Rico
Salem Church was founded by Norwegians to serve the Norwegian community on Staten Island. However, the church has drastically changed in terms of the demographics of their own congregation and the community, which they serve. This has especially happened in the last 20 years. The reason for this drastic change is that the church is a reflection community. As the people on Staten Island stopped being of Norwegian ethnicity, so did the church. So as the types of immigrants has changed, so has Salem Church. Rather than being completely white and Norwegian, the congregation now has members from all over the world, including South America and Africa. Eli Ruiz, born in Puerto Rico, is one such member. His biography of moving to the continental United States as a child, speaking Spanish as his main language, the importance of language in his religion, his experience with Spanish churches and preference for Salem Church reflect the changing ethnic make-up of not only Staten Island and the United States, but also the change in the Evangelical Religion in this country.
At Eli’s house, my eyes run up the right side of the doorframe and see the mezuzah nailed there. It is a faded white, but there is no mistaking the distinctive mezuzah placement. I wonder briefly about why a very religious Christian man would hang a mezuzah, containing its words from the Old Testament, on the doorframe of his place of business.
Eli arrives in a giant, orange, hummer, complete with the image of his face, and the address of his business, on the door. A few minutes later, we are sitting across from each other in a room where I assume he probably sells homes in. There is a folding table, a desk, a computer, and some chairs. He has a Styrofoam Dunkin Donuts cup in front of him. I start the recorder.
A Changing Ethnic Landscape
“Can you please state your full name?”
“Elias Ruiz”
“Elias Ruiz, okay um….okay so where is your family originally from?”
“100 percent Puerto Rican, they’re all from Puerto Rico.”
“All from Puerto Rico?”
From here, we get into a conversation that explains the mezuzah on his doorframe. His grandfather came from Spain and was a Sephardic Jew who married a Christian woman in Puerto Rico, which explains why Eli is a Christian himself. I learn that Eli did not grow up with much of a Jewish influence however, as he left Puerto Rico when he was only 6. We talk about Eli’s experience of coming to the continental United States.
“So being from Puerto Rico is the not the same thing as being an immigrant…but…
“No, Puerto Rico is a common wealth, belongs to the United States. It’s just like living in any one of the states except that it’s an island”
He says this, but he makes the distinction between “Puerto Rican” and “American” and “Puerto Rico” and “America” a few times over the next hour. Despite being an American citizen from birth, Eli had the immigrant experience. He, along with 470,000 other Puerto Ricans migrated to New York in the 1950s. This was due to a decline in jobs available on the island following WWII and a shift from an agricultural to manufacturing economy. The number is higher than the amount of Puerto Ricans who migrated to the United States in any other decade, and indeed a reflection of the changing ethnic make-up of the continental country (Lehman College). According to the Pew Report, about 15% of Hispanics (not necessarily Puerto Ricans) are Evangelical Protestants. In addition, Puerto Ricans have a higher percentage of Evangelical Protestants than other Hispanic groups (Pew Report).
The Importance of Language
I learn that as a child, the new Brooklyn resident’s mother made them read the bible in Spanish, and then the Spanish newspapers when they got older. It was all they spoke at home, and he only learned English “in school and on the street.” This rule of his mother’s follows the Pew Report’s assessment of language use in Hispanic Immigrants where they found that 95% of Hispanic adults believe that it is important for descendants to be able to speak Spanish (Pew Report). Along with the emphasis of Spanish, Eli’s mother was a “diehard Pentecostal” and took them to church quite often “5 or 6 days a week.” This was a Hispanic church, where Spanish was spoken at the services. While Eli agrees that it is important to teach your children Spanish, he also notes that churches, which do not preach in English, lose the children. This is how he explains why the Norwegian church is no longer ethnically Norwegian nor does it have services in the language:
“…. When they [the Norwegians] started there, their purpose was really to make it easier for the Norwegians over here that hardly spoke any English. And it was all done in Norwegian…the Christians, we [the Christians] tend to focus on the language, but our main purpose is not to have someone speak the language. Our main purpose in the Church is so the Church will grow, the Church will flourish, that the Church will divide and we’ll get satellite Churches out of it. And eventually, it will blend in with the rest of the world. …. in order to keep them [the young people] there they better minister in English. Because if not, they’ll grow up and go somewhere else. So, eventually, that’s how we weeded out, so now of course everything is in English.”
When one understands this, it is easy to see why Salem Church began to change only in the last 20 years while Hispanic people have been immigrating for decades. The emphasis on Spanish, having services in the language and being in a community that speaks it, lessens with each later generation.
Despite people like Eli’s mother, and the 95% of Hispanics that think it is important for future generations to speak Spanish, only about 47% of third generation Latinos can speak Spanish proficiently (Pew Report). A church like Salem Church that is welcoming to all ethnicities and speaks English at its services and going to be preferable to these members of the third generation over an ethnically Hispanic Church. For Eli, his decision to join an English speaking church had more to do with his wife who did not speak Spanish. However, Evangelical churches across the country speak English and unlike the Hispanic churches, they consider spreading the religion more important than catering to any one ethnicity. This de-emphasis on language in the children of immigrants is a major factor in the changing ethnic make-up of Salem Church, and churches like it.
Disaster, Community Outreach, and Atmosphere
During Hurricane Sandy, Salem Church was devoted to helping people. They helped in cleaning up property, distributing food, and giving assistance wherever it was needed. Eli himself donated money to the cause, and some of his time (though much of this was monopolized by his own business). The congregation increased following the hurricane. This is always a positive change, Eli tells me. It shows that the community wants what the church has to offer such as the youth groups, personable pastors, and a welcoming environment.
The people that Salem Church was assisting were people of all backgrounds, and so people of all backgrounds would later join the church after receiving help from the congregation. This added to the diversity already present, but Eli tells me that when he joined in the early 2000s, the already diverse (but not quite so much as today) congregation was important to his decision to join. For him, this added to the welcoming and loving environment that one expects from a church.
It is important to note that diversity increases diversity. A church with an atmosphere that is clearly welcoming toward minority groups will attract all sorts of different types of people. Unlike strictly Hispanic churches, a more open church does not have to worry about growth because they will always have new members joining. Salem Church has achieved this. Its atmosphere excludes no one. Because of this, the church has grown both in ethnic representation and congregation size.
Conclusion
Language, immigration, and community outreach are three main reasons for the change in Salem Church. Originally, the language, immigrants, and community were all Norwegian. Now that that is no longer true, the church still tries to serve its community to the best of its ability. This meant switching from Norwegian to English, and reaching out to a community that was quite diverse. By doing this, however, the church has managed to grow and it has attracted members like Elias Ruiz. As a migrant from Puerto Rico, Eli represents the change in the ethnic make-up of the continental United States, and the Evangelical church in this country.
Written by:
Rachel Smalle
“The Heart of Salem Church”
Interview with Greta Larsen, a lifelong advocate for Salem Church
Introduction
As a person who has “grown up”, so to speak, at Salem Church, I know a lot about the people that go there. It’s been a longtime knowledge of mine that the elderly Norwegian demographic does not particularly enjoy our modern worship music. And now, as a current staff member, I know that the only reason the organ still sits at the front of the sanctuary, covered and broken, is that its removal would cause a huge commotion amongst this particular group. Although Salem Church was once a traditional, ethnic-Norwegian body, today, it’s a house of worship belonging to countless nationalities of people from nearly every continent on earth. Because of its diversity, and also the modernization and growth of the church, many things have changed. I was curious to find out how this change has affected a particular member of this elderly Norwegian ethnic group: Greta Larsen. Greta is in her mid-nineties and has been a member of Salem Church since she was a little girl. If anyone could speak on behalf of their behalf, it would be Greta.
After carrying out the interview, I have seen that Greta’s heart is truly fixed on the eyes of Jesus Christ. These changes have bothered and saddened her, but the most important thing is The Gospel; the reason she lives. And The Gospel is this: God is perfect, but through the fall of Adam and Eve into sin, mankind has become imperfect. For this reason, there is a barrier between God and man. The only way to atone for sin is sacrifice. God loved the world so much that he sent His perfect Son, Jesus Christ, into the world as a Man to be the perfect sacrifice that would pay the punishment for every sin that ever was or ever would be committed by all of mankind. He was crucified, yet He overcame death three days later and was resurrected. Because of this, Romans 10:13 says that, “Whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
The Story of Greta Larsen: Still The Same
As the second service of the morning is beginning below, a sweet, spirited woman is seated at a round table in the church’s spare conference room. She appears youthful, wearing a flowery spring dress and dandelion-yellow cardigan. Her foldable walker resting on the wall reminds me that, in fact, many decades stand between this woman and her childhood. Greta Larsen is eighty-five years old. She is the longest-standing member (of eighty-three years) of Salem Evangelical Free Church in Staten Island, New York. For Greta, although this church has experienced much transformation throughout the past decade or so, its heart has remained the same.
The Heart is The Gospel
It may seem odd that a woman of this age would be so confident in saying that things haven’t changed very much. Her confidence stems from this: The Gospel. The reason Salem Church is the same, at its core, today was it was in the early 20th century is that Gospel of Jesus Christ has always been preached. This message first reached Greta when she was a young girl. She explained, that at eleven years old, she realized, “that even as a child, I would need to be saved”. This experience happened during a Sunday evening service at the church. “That’s when I accepted the Lord”, she said.
Early History
According to Greta, Salem Church was founded by Norwegians and continued to grow as a result of further Norwegian migration to America. The children of these early members were sent to English-speaking schools, gradually causing the church to cross over into the English language. She remembers this change occurring when she was about five or six. It’s important to mention that Greta’s recollections of this transition are much earlier than those of other Salem Church members. So, perhaps the use of the Norwegian language at Salem didn’t fully stop when Greta was a child, but slowly lessened from that point on.
Greta’s Ministry
Greta made it very clear that she has always loved her church. As a child, she -by choice- attended three services every Sunday. She called it her “privilege” to go. As she matured, Greta became a very active layperson at Salem. Beginning in her teenage and young adult years, she taught Sunday school classes, played the organ, and became the president of the young women’s group. “It got crowded, actually, when everybody came.”, she said. The women’s group was very large. When I asked her how many of the women were Norwegian, she responded, “None of them”. This indicates that the church had already become diverse at this point. “There were all kinds.”, she said. “Irish, Italian, everything.”
A New Church
Salem grew so much in these early years that they needed a new building. This seemed to be a special time in Greta’s memory: “Every Saturday, my husband as well as other men would give up their Saturday at home and stay all day at church.” Their wives (including Greta) prepared lunch and coffee breaks for them on site. It took several years to build the church. Since then, Salem Church hasn’t changed much in appearance. The only “big change” in the past several decades was the addition of the Thomas Maddox Memorial Gymnasium. I asked Greta if she felt any sentimental significance to the building itself and she said she didn’t have any: “It’s not a building; it’s what’s inside a building… what God has done for us.”
Throughout The Years
As many years went by, Greta believes that Salem has stayed the same. The ethnicities inside and the population have changed quite significantly, but the most important matter to her is that every pastor of Salem Church has preached the Gospel “to its fullest”.
Growth
Out of the many she mentioned, one pastor seemed to stand out in Greta Larsen’s mind: Eddie Cole. Pastor Eddie came to Salem in 2003 and is still the Lead Pastor today in 2014. During these years, the church has changed more than it has at any other point in time. Greta believes that this is because of Pastor Eddie’s “evangelistic” style of preaching, “which is needed today”. To evangelize is to share the Gospel with someone, in hopes that he or she might accept the free gift of salvation that Jesus paid for on the cross. Whatever the cause was, the church began to grow like it never had before. New yearly outreaches like Upward Basketball, Utopia Summer Camps, and the Live Nativity were started. Today, Salem is not even remotely recognizable as a Norwegian church, aside from a few members. Hundreds of people of all different colors and nationalities sit in the wooden pews each Sunday morning. The church is vibrant. Greta likes it this way. She’s very happy that so many people want to come to church.
A Challenge for the Elderly Norwegians
As much as Greta enjoys the vibrancy of today’s church, she wishes some things had remained the same. Although the Norwegian people were once the dominating demographic at Salem, those that remain are today a small minority. Greta represents this minority. Her sadness results mainly from the transition to modern worship music. Greta, along with many of her peers, loves the old hymns. She said, “The words are so much more meaningful…a hymn does something for your heart.” She’s very upset that the worship team hardly plays them anymore. For her, the new songs just aren’t memorable. However, unlike many of her close friends, she wasn’t willing to leave Salem and find a more traditional church. She referred to those who did as “church tramps”. “The only time you should leave a church is if they stop preaching The Gospel.”, Greta said. This makes it clear that, although the old music is important to her, the truth of the Gospel is more important. Salem Church might have stopped worshipping with the songs that she loves, but they haven’t stopped worshipping the same Savior.
A New Chapter
Greta’s personal ministry has always been an important part of her life. As an adult and mother, she’s found that she’s gifted with being very hospitable to others. When her kids were young, Greta used to love having missionary families stay at her home. They would share their fascinating stories of faraway lands like Japan and France. In her forties, Greta felt called to use this gift of serving others in a whole new way: nursing. Greta explained that it all started when she watched a man die in the hospital. She wished that a Christian nurse could have been there to “speak to him about God”. Then, she realized that it could be her. This was a challenge for Greta, because she “detests school”. After countless sleepless nights of feeling overwhelmingly burdened to pursue this new career, she went back to school and became a nurse. In this vocation, Greta was able to share the Gospel with many people on their deathbeds. “I was happy because I knew they would be in heaven.”, she said. It’s clear that the message of The Gospel was central to her existence.
She’s Glad She Stayed
Salem Church has changed in many ways since Greta Larsen’s youth, but one important thing has remained the same: the Gospel. This is what Greta believes to be the only matter of importance. From eleven to eighty-five, her children have grown and married, her husband has passed, and some parts of the church have changed, but Greta has not stopped believing in the message of Jesus Christ. Looking back on all those years, Greta Larsen is truly glad that she stayed at Salem Church. For now, until she goes to be with her Lord, it’s her “home”.
Written by:
Brooke Dahl
