Nebraska United Methodists Mobilize to Minister to Immigrants

First United Methodist Church, Lexington, in central Nebraska, is not what you likely would think of when you think “Cornhusker State.” Lexington, population 12,000, has a Tyson’s meat-processing plant that employs one-fourth of the human beings in the community, nearly three-thousand souls. The school system serves a wide range of students, eighty percent of whom live in homes that speak languages other than English. When you walk into the high school lobby, immediately you see flags of forty nations flying. Most of the workers in the meat-processing plant are immigrants, largely from Latin America and Africa. And they have more children than the average American family.

Lexington is not what it used to be!

Immigration to a strange land has always been challenging for families. Add to that working conditions in a meat-processing plant, with blood running under workers' feet all day, and you begin to get the picture that these folks lead stressful lives.

Enter the United Methodists. Two United Methodist clergy work inside the walls of the plant, one as a chaplain, and the other as a human resources manager. The latter, the Rev. Albert Longe, recently gave Path 1 strategist Paul Nixon his first tour inside a meat-processing plant. These two pastors love their people and work to cultivate a spirit of camaraderie within the plant and community. Meanwhile, both the retiring and incoming principals of the nine-hundred-student Lexington High School are members of Lexington United Methodist Church. Listening to outgoing principal Audrey Downey talk about her students, one hears such love and pride about her beautiful multi-cultural school. Both at work and at school, United Methodists are living out their faith in relationship with vulnerable people and helping them develop solid lives as they move toward American citizenship.