Word: baptiste
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...well that Pecos became a thriving cotton center (pop. 12,450). To pick the crop each year, Pecos depends mainly on the braceros-legally imported Mexican laborers who come north to work the season for free transportation, shelter and an average of $35 a week. This year the Baptist General Convention of Texas decided to do something about their souls as well as their bodies. With a team of 13 Latin American Baptists, marimba-playing Preacher Hernandez checked into Pecos' Lone Star Motel for a week-long Cottonpatch Crusade...
...organized his own dance band, proved expert at setting up the braceros with music before following with Spanish-language tracts and exhortations emphasizing clean lives and the obligation to return to wives and children with full pockets. On Saturday night, when the sombreroed braceros jammed the streets and shops, Baptist Hernandez sent his preaching teams fanning out through town. Stationing himself in front of the Safeway store, he soon had his Mexican listeners pressing forward to make "decisions for Christ"-though some were just being amiable to the young man in fine clothes who played the wonderful, sad music. None...
This week, as Preacher Hernandez and his Baptist crusaders moved north to Lubbock, where the cotton picking was just beginning, they claimed the results for their week's work: 1,062 conversions...
...workers has regretted the move. At Fieldcrest, the Rev. James K. McConnell visits sick workers, keeps in contact with retired employees, tours the plant daily and makes himself available to people who need help to solve their troubles. All counseling is strictly secret, strictly voluntary. Chaplain McConnell, a Southern Baptist, has an average of three counseling talks a day with Fieldcrest workers on problems ranging from alcoholism to unruly children. In the same manner, neighboring Reynolds Tobacco has been running a successful chaplain program since 1949 and thinks that it makes important business sense: absenteeism is down, production up, plant...
...plant, the Rev. Bernard W. Nelson is even paid by the union itself; he works alongside the men in the automotive division as an ordinary worker, and is strictly neutral on union-management squabbles. Yet he is convinced that production is up because of his counseling efforts. Says Baptist Chaplain Nelson: "Whenever you have 2,000 workers, you always have misunderstandings-most of them as petty as the dickens. I figure that by just sitting down and talking to the people and by showing them the problem can be solved without making a federal case...