Pastor Francisco “Paco” Amador was born in Mexico City. At the age of 14 he gave his life to Jesus. Following a desire to serve him for the rest of his life, Paco came to Chicago for training at the Moody Bible Institute. In 1990 he visited the Little Village neighborhood for the very first time and immediately fell in love with the community, moving there a few years later. He was a missionary in Spain, worked at Lawndale Christian Health Center and taught elementary school for nine years. In 2005 Amador was called into full-time ministry as the pastor at New Life Little Village.
Amador participated in a panel with Daniel Yang and Sam George on “Tomorrow’s Global Church Next Door” at the 2023 Amplify Conference.
In the following interview, Andrew MacDonald, associate director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, discusses the changes in Little Village, and Amador’s vision for a church that welcomes immigrants with the heart of Christ.
Little Village has changed massively over the course of your ministry there. So tell us about these changes. What was Little Village when you started, and how have you as a pastor changed and adapted over time to where we are today?
Little Village was fast becoming the largest Mexican enclave in the Midwestern United States—so a very immigrant community. The neighborhood of Little Village has stayed Mexican over the last 30, 40 years. Just a year or two before I arrived, they created an arch [as] a symbol for the community. And the Mexican president came to inaugurate it,
and then Vicente Fernández, who was the quintessential famous singer like Elvis for Mexico came over to sing.
Fast-forward, [and] the Mexican immigration kind of came to a standstill and then plateaued almost completely in such a way that during the Trump years there were actually more people leaving to go back to Mexico. And in the last couple of years, not Mexican migration, but Central and northern South America has become the incredible influx of people coming into our community.
Twenty-Sixth Street, had been the second highest source of commercial income revenue for the city, second to the Magnificent Mile. And during those years, there began to be boarded up businesses that were abandoned on 26th Street. I remember thinking, Wow, this community is dying.
And now, if you were to walk through our neighborhood, it’s packed, it’s alive, there’s immigrants all over the place. There’s officially been around 15,000 new immigrants arriving from the border.
I love how we as a church have moved to say, Hey, you’re an immigrant. Welcome, we’re immigrants. Not all Latinos are happy to see other Latinos arriving, but in our church and in our community, we’ve tried to push saying, almost every Sunday, “If you’re an immigrant, stand up [and say] what country you’re from. You are welcome. We love you. We’re so glad you’re here.”
And that has changed the heart [of our church] to saying, “God is bringing a harvest.” We’re not preparing for a harvest that will happen somewhere in the field. It’s happening right now. So, we’re super excited about that and preaching Jesus down the streets.
How did you get your people to a place that they were enthusiastic about this, sacrificial about this, and how would you help a pastor who comes to you and says, “My heart’s with you, but my people aren’t.” How did you get them from Point A to Point B, and how can a pastor follow you in that pathway?
That’s a very good question. I feel like specifically for us, we’ve been forward leaning. When you pray the Great Commission, you can never just stay within your people. The Great Commission pushes you out. Jesus was talking to people that mostly had never left Israel in all of their lives, saying, You will be my witnesses in the entire planet. And the [followers realized the] entire planet is filled with pagans, and they are not Jewish people like us. They’re all Gentiles. And Jesus is giving them this image of the impossibility. But it’s by faith. The Holy Spirit is just breaking all kinds of schemas in their own minds.
God is a God on mission, and he invites us to join him in this. The other [thing] is, God’s love for those who have less also moves people in compassion. And in our community, we’re all immigrants from different generations. We need to continue to talk about how the goodness of God has placed us in a position where we can actually be God’s instrument to bless others.
From the very beginning that people arrived, I was blown away because people in our congregation would literally receive people in their own homes. And I’m like thinking, that’s in a sense un-American. I can give money, but once they come into my home, that’s like a very different thing. But Christians have done that through thousands of years. So, it wouldn’t surprise me that that would happen.
We have been called as shepherds to shepherd the flock of Christ, and I feel like we need to continue to move our churches toward compassion for those in need.
That’s a hard sell in some locations. We all have two conversations going on. One of them is the conversation of me being American, and another conversation of me being Christian. And they are very different conversations most of the time. I feel like it’s good to be able to say, yes borders, yes my home. But that is an American conversation. Now let’s talk about this situation as a Christian conversation. What would Jesus say about these things? That has helped me.
Then again, here’s the other reality: As people are walking into the wave [of the Spirit moving], some will stay behind and they will continue to not enter into what God is doing at this moment. And I feel like that’s a sadness. We need to know that it’s a reality.
The mission is not just immigrants, of course, but I feel like God is working through all of us and in all of us as we develop a compassion toward those who have the least. Some will not want to jump into whatever is happening, and the doors will continue to close for them.
The church of Jesus throughout the Chicagoland area, we’re at a great moment of opportunity. We can close our doors, we can close our hearts, and something will happen with that. But we can also open our doors and open our hearts and open our finances and our homes and our churches, our buildings, and they will grow, and they will catch on the wave of whatever the Spirit is doing and saying to the church at the present moment. And it’s a warning and blessing.
How did you learn to speak cross-culturally as a pastor, and what encouragement would you give to a pastor who is wanting to reach out and wanting to speak cross-culturally but is concerned that they’re going to say the wrong thing and put their foot in their mouth. How would you help that pastor?
You know, I’m thinking about immigrants. It’s interesting, Catholic Charities has partnered with us to find apartments, and then we move them into their [home]. I love this ministry. So, we literally are walking into homes with people at the end of four or five or six months from the moment that they left home. They haven’t cooked. They haven’t had their own bathroom. So as we walk in, in a sense we get the privilege of being able to walk them into their home. But most of them have mentioned we’ve encountered Jesus from the moment we left—say somebody is from Venezuela—the moment we left Venezuela, we’ve been encountering Christians throughout the entire time. Many of [the Christians] didn’t preach at them. Many of them, it’s like someone just gave them food, and they recognized it was Jesus. Somebody maybe gave like a word of blessing or something like that, or gave some money, or said, “You can stay in our building,” or just greeted them and gave them some water. And some others are very much more intentional, like preaching and [saying], “Come to our building, we’ll feed you. That kind of stuff.
There’s small ways and big ways, but whichever way, I think we should all do something about it, you know? Even if you just say, “Let’s pray for these people. We have no language to communicate [with them]. Let’s just pray.” I always remind people, it could have been us. Like maybe, just the way these people are feeling, [that] was us 150 years ago. What would I have liked for people to have done back then to me or my great-grandfather?
I think we worry sometimes too much about getting things wrong. But I’d rather just jump in. If you say the wrong thing, you’re insensitive, I feel like most people that are at the very bottom, they can understand whether there’s love behind this or not. People feel like a leaning toward them, you know? You might not speak the same language, you might say the wrong things, but people can translate the leaning toward them, and say, Yeah, I think there’s love there.
A church that has a heart for those in need, if we’re OK with letting different structures from the past be molded into a future, I think our heart of compassion and love, together with words, cannot be stopped. I’m super hopeful for the church in America if we are able to transition into a new season in which we get much more in touch with the love of Jesus.
And it’s just a peace, people who are at peace with Jesus giving Jesus away. I think at some point we’ve got to [break] up with big buildings or big events or big things. And now, what if we’re just faithful believers who just love Jesus, love one another, and we have compassion for those in need, and we just invite people into that. It feels a little bit more like church that grows from the bottom up.
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