Harvard, USA - Roy Peraza, a Cuban-born pastor in one of America's fastest-growing Protestant denominations, trolls this sleepy town's supermarkets and restaurants in search of new Latino converts.
He approaches newly arrived immigrants, many of them lifelong Roman Catholics with few contacts or relatives in the United States.
It is here in the rural U.S. heartland where Peraza and other evangelical and mainline Protestant missionaries seek converts among the avalanche of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Less than a year ago, the Springfield, Missouri-based Assembly of God church told Peraza to start a ministry in the 8,000-strong community, where the Latino population has more than tripled to 3,000 in the past 15 years.
Two decades of steady economic growth in the Midwest and the South has led to thousands of Latin American immigrants searching for jobs in the farm fields and meatpacking factories.
At a recent service in Harvard 75 miles northwest of Chicago, Peraza delivered a sermon in Cuban-inflected Spanish, led singing in the language and played salsa tunes on the church organ.
"I just need to throw the net and they will fall in," Peraza told Reuters.
PRIEST SHORTAGE CITED
An overall shortage of Roman Catholic priests, particularly a lack of Spanish speakers, has encouraged the exodus of Latinos to Protestant churches, scholars say. The Assembly of God and Baptist churches appear to be among those having the greatest success in attracting immigrants.
Pilar Villegas, a Mexican immigrant who lives in Rochelle, Illinois, is one of the thousands of Latinos who have recently converted after growing up Catholic.
"I never considered myself a Catholic," said Villegas, who converted nine months ago after reading a flyer about an Assembly of God church in this rural city of 9,000 people. "The Catholic church doesn't really match my way of thinking."
Like Villegas almost all the other members of the Buenas Nuevas church, a small temple overlooking a corn field, are former Catholics who said they used to feel distanced from the Catholic Church. Many said they previously saw Catholic priests as part of a hierarchy that interfered with direct worship.
Recent Latino converts also said Protestant and evangelical churches were offering a more close-knit community, making it easier for them to meet others who speak their language and share a similar background while living in a strange land.
The new wave of Latino evangelization has added a difficult challenge for the already beleaguered American Catholic church.
"This is a positive challenge for the Catholic Church," said Rev. Virgilio Elizondo, a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame and a parish priest in San Antonio, Texas. Elizondo described the challenge as positive because the Latinos are remaining Christian.
"There is no easy answer to this phenomenon," he said, adding that his church has limited resources to cope with the massive influx of Latinos around the country, especially in rural areas.
Sister Luz, a Catholic nun in Harvard, is organizing prayer groups to reach out to the newly arrived immigrants and reinforce Roman Catholic beliefs and traditions.
"We need to strengthen the faith," she said at the end of the first of two Spanish Sunday masses that packed the St. Joseph church. "We don't want people to convert (to a Protestant faith) only because of ignorance."
HEAVY CATHOLIC PRESENCE
Latino immigrants are considered to be the backbone of the American Catholic Church -- the country's largest single denomination -- that has recently struggled with allegations of sexual misconduct by priests and dwindling church attendance.
About 40 percent of the 67 million Catholics in the United States are Latinos, according to the U.S. Bishop Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The intensive recruiting of Latinos mirrors aggressive proselytizing by Protestant churches in largely Catholic Latin America. The effort has yielded a growing number of Protestant-converted immigrants trickling into the country, experts said.
The recruitment comes at a time when historically all-white U.S. Protestant and evangelical denominations are faced with sluggish membership growth. For the last decade mainline Protestant denominations have had dwindling numbers.
"This is a religious awakening," said Edwin Hernandez, the director of the Center for the Study of Latino Religion at Notre Dame. "Latinos are revitalizing many denominations that for years have been stagnant."
About one-fourth of U.S. Latinos -- about 8 million people -- belong to Protestant churches, with most of the rest Roman Catholic, according to surveys.
"(Latinos) are crucial for the growth of our denomination," said Bob Reccord, the president of the North American Mission Board of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination. "This is a massive shift."
Of the 72,000 Southern Baptist congregations across the nation, 2,781 are Latino-dominated churches and the group estimates it will spend about $10 million solely on Hispanic ministries this year. A church task force announced earlier this year plans to evangelize 50,000 Latinos and build 250 Latino churches annually through 2010.
BAPTISTS LURE LATINOS
Already, Latino churches in parts of the U.S. South account for about a third of all new Southern Baptist churches in the region, church officials said.
This year, the United Methodist Church channeled $3.8 million to build Latino churches, train Hispanic pastors and send consultants to English-speaking churches that want to provide services for Latinos.
The Methodist church has lost more than 287,000 followers since 1997 and is looking for ways to recover.
"We are doing everything we can," said Miguel Albert, the head of the Methodist's National Plan for Hispanic Ministry, adding that the church plans to create 100 new Latino congregations and train 800 Latino missionaries in the next four years.