Jesse Miranda (1937—2019)
Country of Origin
-
United States
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- United States
Traditions
- Pentecostal
Ministries
- pastor
- Christian educator
Jesse Miranda (Nine years later the network merged into today’s National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference—NHCLC—which embraces more than 40,000 congregations.)
Little Jesse was just six years old when he first climbed up into the Albuquerque church bus to ride to Sunday School. There he learned many things, including how to write. They gave him toys for Christmas. They spoke about a Jesus who loved Mexican-Americans like him, would save them, and even heal them.
His parents said little about all this; after all, his father—a sawmill worker who had received less than one month of schooling—claimed to be Catholic, while his mother—who had gotten as far as third grade—was only a nominal Protestant. But when Jesse was eight, she became seriously ill. Her young son told the people at his little church about this, and soon they showed up at the Miranda home to pray for her. She recovered.
Moving into his early teens, the boy thought much about spiritual things. One day he said, “Dad, Catholics never read the Bible,” because he had never seen him read it. “Mother, you read the Bible,” he continued, “but never come to the book of Acts." And then they would turn around and say, “And you Pentecostals never leave the book of Acts.” So I saw my shortcomings and I saw differences. Yet we loved and respected one another…. We all affirmed one another.
Growing up in the barrio, Jesse avoided the pervasive gangs and drugs. He and his friends chose rather to hang out in one of the many junk cars and use their imaginations.
We’d sit in the cars and say, “Let’s go to California”—wherever that was. One would say, “I see the mountains,” then “I see the desert.” Finally somebody’d say, “I see the ocean—I guess we got there.”
The fantasy became reality after high school, when Jesse Miranda managed to enroll at the Assemblies of God’s Southern California College (now Vanguard University), where he would earn a bachelor’s degree. Along the way, his hometown pastor back in New Mexico nudged him one summer to start a church in a storefront, despite a bar on one side and a dance hall on the other. He made it work. The Assemblies ordained him by age 20, he married a young woman named Susan, and they began ministry in the Hispanic churches of the Southwest. In just a couple of years, Latin American Bible Institute invited him to teach courses.
While gradually taking on more and more denominational responsibilities, he somehow found time and energy over the years to earn two master’s degrees (one at the Christian institution Biola University, the other at Cal State-Fullerton) and even a doctorate at Fuller Theological Seminary. That may have been the fruit of his mother’s long-ago comment after pointing out “the only man I ever knew, until I was probably 20 years old, that had a degree. Joe Martinez was there, and he was at the altar on his knees, and he was a layman but a university professor.” Said Mrs. Miranda, “Now son, I’d like for you to be an educated man.” The image made a permanent impression.
Always a keen listener, his exposure to the wider Christian landscape led him to notice two concerns. One was that many Hispanic church leaders seemed disconnected from each other. By 1992 he had founded the Alianza de Ministerios Evangelicos Nacionales (abbreviated AMEN) to encourage interaction. (Nine years later the network merged into today’s National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference—NHCLC—which embraces more than 40,000 congregations.)
The second, even wider, problem was absence from the majority Christian power centers.
I was watching a cable television station that was carrying a meeting of evangelicals on racial reconciliation. I was excited to see this demonstration of Christian unity. But then my phone rang, and a Hispanic leader on the other end asked if I was watching this. When I told him I was, he asked, “Is your TV in black and white? Because mine is; it looks like a rerun from the 1960s. Why aren’t we part of this discussion?”
Miranda bore no grudge against African-American Christians; he sought only to get into the dialogue alongside them, to “help us all work through the differences of skin pigmentation, culture, or history.” He believed there was value to be gained from ethnic Americans who “live in the hyphen.” He called upon Christians of all hues to highlight not only the Exodus story (deliverance from oppression) but also the Samaria story of John 4, where Jesus engaged someone nearby from a different ethnicity. In a Christianity Today commentary he wrote:
The Samaritans, being both Jew and Gentile, were...mestizos of the time. Despite strong historical, cultural, and religious taboos, Jesus speaks with the woman. His disciples, carriers of the dominant Jewish tradition, are numbed, indifferent and both literally and figuratively “out to lunch” during this prophetic encounter. Meanwhile, Jesus affirms the woman’s personhood and leads her to faith in him. She, in turn, spreads the good news of the Gospel to her community, creating a new cultural and spiritual paradigm….Under the skin, we are all kin. We are all members of the human race and familia.
This kind of viewpoint, graciously expressed, opened many doors for Jesse Miranda. Azusa Pacific University, one of the largest evangelical schools, invited him to become its associate dean of urban and ethnic affairs; he served in this role for nearly a decade. Even the White House took notice; three U.S. presidents in a row (George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) sought his counsel on Hispanic affairs.
But he never abandoned his book-of-Acts convictions. At age sixty-three he returned to the college where he had started, Vanguard, to support its Hispanic students and set up a Center for Urban Studies and Ethnic Leadership. “The church was born to be global,” he insisted. “The church must not see diversity as a problem to be solved but rather as the way to complete its prophetic identity. To this end, racial and ethnic groups are the social and spiritual capital of the Body of Christ.”
When the boy from the barrio passed away in 2019, Samuel Rodriguez, his successor at NHCLC (who himself has received White House access) summarized Miranda’s life with passion on Facebook: “His commitment to Christ, real. His prophetic voice, renewing. His love for the marginalized, relentless. I love and forever will honor you, Bro. Jesse! You changed my life!”