Two continental congresses, scheduled within four months of each other, highlight the dilemma of Latin American Protestants in 1969. They symbolize the tensions building between extremists to the left and right within the evangelical church. They highlight the growing gap between Protestant leaders of North and South America. And they reveal the degree of polarization already present within the Latin American Protestant community.
July was the time and Buenos Aires the place of CELA III, the third Latin American Congress of Evangelicals (see August 22 issue, page 36). The Latin American Congress on Evangelism will be the other one. This will be held in Bogota in November, an evangelically sponsored follow-up to the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin.
The first of the ecumenically oriented CELA congresses was convened in Buenos Aires in 1949, the second in Lima, Peru, in 1961. Five years later, the Evangelical Federation of Brazil was to sponsor CELA III. But problems of relationship and confidence developed and CELA III was several times postponed until finally the Brazilian committee tossed the ball to the River Plate church federations (Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay).
With a strong assist from UNELAM (an ecumenically financed committee for the promotion of evangelical unity in Latin America), the congress finally came to birth in July, suffering from a fundamentalist boycott in some quarters. It is unfortunate that its leaders postponed it to within four months of the Latin American Congress on Evangelism. Many people who might have desired to be present at both have perhaps been forced to choose between the two. Nevertheless, attendance at CELA III was good, and representation—both geographical and denominational—was all that could be expected. A few evangelical missionaries probably stayed away as a result of the boycott recommended by an inter-mission committee in Latin America. But the effect of their absence was minimal.
One of the most significant factors of CELA III was the presence and influence of the Pentecostals. One delegate commented that apparently they have lost their fear of the ecumenicals. Since these large denominations (mostly Chilean and Brazilian) are self-supporting, they don’t worry about what a U. S. constituency might think of their association with World Council executives. Representing about 63 per cent of the communicant membership of the Protestant churches, the Pentecostals are beginning to find themselves as a group and want to have their proportionate share in shaping things in Latin America.
While CELA III’s tone was surprisingly evangelical—some of the more radical documents were returned to committee for rewriting, and many of the sermons, study papers, and lectures were refreshingly conservative—the congress, nevertheless, was problem-centered. Many of its leaders and planners seemed to be at least as concerned about the reforming of society in Latin America as about the evangelization of the continent.
The Bogotá congress in November promises a different emphasis. Its announced program reflects little consciousness of the deep and vexing social problems that currently are shaking the Latin American church, though its planners are undoubtedly aware of this lack and may be suggesting guidelines to serve as correctives. Bogotá’s carefully restricted invitations, inoffensive topics, and “safe” speakers cast a shadow very definitely to the right.
These two continental gatherings are symbols of a growing disunity in what to now has been a relatively homogeneous Latin American Protestant community. They represent the unhappy polarization of Christians who by and large are not really that far apart in doctrine but are responding to pressures—economic and otherwise—that can be traced to extremist elements in both wings and often to sources outside Latin America. The congresses accentuate differences that are primarily sociological, concerning attitudes towards social reform, revolution, economics, the role of the Christian in a developing society, and the priorities to be placed on these and other factors.
Social Development In Latin America
To understand the Church’s problems in Latin America, one needs to know about the social needs and frustrations of the continent. These can be summarized in two words: marginalized masses.
With a few notable exceptions (like Mexico, where land ownership and other social structures were radically altered by the revolution that culminated in 1917), the infusions of capital and the spotty prosperity seen in Latin America are just making the rich richer and—relatively, therefore—the poor poorer. Most people remain outside the mainstream of development. Latin America’s marginalized masses include the Indians (who in Bolivia make up 70 per cent of the population), the farmers (who average 70 per cent of the population throughout the continent), the slum dwellers (whose number is swelling alarmingly), the illiterates (nearly half the adult population), the children (one hundred million of them) without sufficient classrooms or prospects of employment, the peónes and other subsistence laborers.
Latin American society is riddled with injustice. Despite their sometimes liberal constitutions, the people have never lived under truly democratic conditions except in a few places, such as Costa Rica and Uruguay. In the Latin American wars of independence which were more or less contemporary with our own, the oligarchy simply wrested power from the crown and became the new establishment. Social structures persisted. Feudalism continued. Education remained the exclusive privilege of the elite. Peonage and serfdom continued as economic institutions. Government was never “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
As a result, the structures of government have always resisted revision and have generally alternated between conservative, elected authority—chosen by the literate elite—and military dictatorships. These are the centers of power, wealth, and privilege, with the clergy often throwing the balance one way or the other. Meanwhile, the rapidly growing masses continue to be marginalized.
Traditionally, in Latin America, the Roman Catholic Church has been linked with the status quo and has winked at conditions creating greater pressures on the underprivileged populace. The Protestant churches, on the other hand, have often found the warmest reception to their preaching of the Gospel in the underprivileged classes, particularly in the urban laboring masses and among the isolated farmers. Notably, the Pentecostal emphasis has drawn large followings in the burgeoning cities like Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City.
One would expect, therefore, that the Catholic Church would defend the status quo and the Protestant churches call for social revolution. Historically this has tended to be true. But things are changing. While on the one hand the Catholic hierarchy is becoming aware of its social blindspots and is repudiating its colonial posture in favor of radical reform, on the other hand the Protestant community—basically conservative in origin and attitude—increasingly is reacting against Communism and other extremes, and is assuming an other-worldly position that involves zealous preaching of the Gospel to needy individuals but naïvely assumes that all social evils will take care of themselves.
Revolution And Revolutionary Attitudes
Despite our annual celebration of July 4, the very word revolution scares most North Americans. Many of us have inherited from our Protestant background an innate respect for the “powers that be.” This is a concept derived directly from the thirteenth chapter of Romans, an acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God. To this we have linked a deep-rooted respect for the due process of law—“Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake.” And although we recognize that legality and justice are not always synonymous, nevertheless, if we must choose between them, we will prefer legality because in the long run it is the only permanent and impersonal guarantor of justice. We tend to be patient, therefore, with the gangsters or racketeers whom the law has as yet been unable to touch. A man is innocent until legally proven guilty.
When extended into international relations, this same attitude makes the United States more indulgent toward the Latin American governments of the oligarchy or of the military, as long as they can demonstrate a de facto legality of tenure. Thus the United States supports dictators or military cliques up and down the continent in open deviation from our own political philosophy.
The average Latin American does not share this viewpoint. He is accustomed to seeing corruption and nepotism in high places. He does not identify human authority with God. He has too often seen his church jump from one bandwagon to another. He is impatient with the due process of law—perhaps because he has seen it too often warped and thwarted. His preference is for flaming justice. He is governed by passion, not logic. His historical memory flashes back not to the signing of a Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia but to Simón Bolivar of Jose San Martin, mounted on a white charger, brandishing a sword, leading the liberating forces against the colonial troops of the Spanish emperor. His history and his temperament combine to give him a disposition for revolution, and this has become for him an accepted way of life.
True, most revolutions in Latin America are not really that. They are simply coups d’état, perhaps the only expedient whereby power may be passed from one regime to another when power and government have become so highly centralized and personalized that no normal mechanisms can exist for their orderly transition. The palace revolution does not really change things very much. The bloodshed is not ordinarily excessive, and the coup at least assures the termination of one regime of graft and makes it necessary for its successor to start from scratch!
The true revolution is something else. The word itself suggests a turning of the wheels of progress wherein anachronistic structures are displaced and a new order of things is initiated. The agrarian reform of the Mexican revolution, for example, redistributed more than half of the nation’s productive land among 2.6 million peasants, creating unprecedented demands for transportation, building materials, and other products of industry that completely restructured the national economy. Bolivia, too, has undergone profound social change as a result of its revolution and the nationalization of the mines and petroleum industries. And Castro’s Cuba, in painful isolation from the rest of the continent, is laboring to bring forth a genuine revolution of total social dimensions.
Using the word in this latter sense of radical social change, I think we must accept the inevitability of revolution in Latin America. The status quo cannot long endure. The rough reception accorded Nelson Rockefeller on his recent fact-finding tours is evidence enough of the urgency of Latin American sentiments. “We can’t wait for traditional programs and normal evolution,” is the cry. “We need action now—to feed our hungry children, to provide jobs for our graduates, to abolish our expensive armies, to develop our diminishing resources.”
The Church should not pin its hopes falsely on a complacent gradualism, nor should it turn to a bloody apocalypse or violent revolution. Its prophetic role is not to espouse apocalyptic action but to denounce evil. However, it is called to minister in a context of revolution, and it cannot pretend ignorance of social wickedness nor fail to focus God’s Word upon it. Neither may it comfort itself into thinking that by peddling a biblical variety of other-worldly piety it is proclaiming the whole counsel of God.
Polarization And The Christian Church
Conversion of individuals does not in itself change society. Nor does a changed society assure the conversion of its individual members. But there is a profound causal relation between man and his environment and an equally profound responsibility incumbent upon him within it. Inevitably they interact. And neither can be ignored.
Without reducing the tempo of its Christian witness to people as individuals, therefore, the Church must be alert to its social environment and not retreat from any God-given responsibility to help change the climate within which it is expected to minister to the total needs of men.
It is this tension between an individualistic evangelism and a posture of social involvement that is polarizing Christians in Latin America. Voices from the left were heard at CELA III in Buenos Aires. Voices from the right are programmed for the evangelism congress in Bogotá. But there is little evidence that the left and right are really listening to each other. Doctrinally, in Latin America the left and right are not too far apart. But the pressures from the United States—scarred by the liberal-fundamentalist controversy of a generation ago and the current confrontation with the “new evangelism”—are tending to push them into an unhealthy polarization that is bound to be detrimental to the Body of Christ.
The CELA III program is now in the past. There is nothing we can do about it except pray that the delegates were given clear insights into the priorities of apostolic patterns in evangelism, and that they were reawakened to the inescapable calling of personal witness for Jesus Christ without losing the concern for the total needs of man that has traditionally characterized the conciliar posture.
But Bogotá still lies ahead. To its leaders we can direct some pointed questions:
1. Will the delegates be challenged by an exposure to the galloping pace of economic and social problems in Latin America? Will the coming famine, the armies of the unemployed, and the breakdown of educational and public services be reflected in the definitions of our evangelistic task?
2. What kind of call should we be issuing to dissident elements in the Roman Catholic Church today? Will congress delegates hear anything about renewal within the Roman community? the Catholic Family Movement? the posture of Protestantism in a new climate of religious pluralism?
3. Will there be any effort to examine constructively the forms and structures of the Latin American church? its peculiar patterns of lay and clerical leadership? its sterile reflections of North American perspectives? Does it deserve the confidence of Latin American society? Is it demonstrating the revolutionary power of the Gospel?
4. Will the purpose of the congress be clearly one of unity rather than divisiveness? Will the tendencies towards polarization be consciously resisted? Will Christian brothers from north and south and left and right have real dialogue with one another concerning the overwhelming pressures and problems that hinder our evangelistic purpose? Or will the hand say to the foot, “I have no need of thee”?
Some of the documents and findings of the CELA III congress should be helpful. They are too eloquent to be ignored. The Bogotá delegates must be humble enough and open enough to get the message. We need to listen to what the Spirit has said to the churches—to all the churches. This is basic to any serious assessment of today’s evangelistic task.
To fulfill God’s purpose for it and the aspirations of its sponsors, the Bogotá congress must seek to enlist the whole Body of Christ in the total task of evangelizing Latin America, not in the mood of a decade ago but in the contemporary context of revolution.
W. Dayton Roberts is associate and general director of the Latin America Mission and has been a missionary in Colombia and Costa Rica for nearly thirty years. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and Princeton Seminary.
