Two leading evangelicals are currently helping draft a new constitution for the fifteen million people of Peru. They form part of a Constitutional Assembly of 100 elected delegates, chosen from 1,200 candidates.
The evangelicals are Pedro Arana and Arnaldo Alvarado. Arana, better known outside Peru, is the secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (the umbrella organization for groups such as Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship) for western South America. He is also an elder in the Presbyterian Church of Pueblo Libre (Lima), having studied theology in Edinburgh, Scotland. Alvarado is a former race car driver and member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church of Lima.
Alvarado has long been a participant in the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance political party (APRA), which won the majority of seats in the Assembly. Arana also ran under APRA sponsorship, although he has not yet joined the party in spite of receiving the fourth highest total of votes for any APRA candidate. Arana believes it was the evangelical balloting that elected him, even though evangelicals total only about 2 per cent of the population of Peru.
A third evangelical candidate, however, Luciano Wise, was eliminated.
The task before the Assembly, which was convened last July, is to write a new constitution that will incorporate the socialist changes brought to the country during eleven years of military rule. If the Assembly fails to do this, several generals have warned that its work will be annulled. Upon completion of an acceptable document, elections are to be called immediately for a civilian government. The Assembly has until July 28, 1979, to finish its assignment.
Arana is participating in a study group on state and church, whose findings will help delineate this aspect of the constitution. A former evangelical senator, José Ferreira (IEP), and lawyer Carlos García (Baptist) meet frequently with Arana to counsel him.
This is the highest that evangelicals have risen in Peruvian affairs since General San Martín invited British Bible Society missionary James Thompson to Lima to create an educational system based on the Scriptures (1821). Shortly after, repressive measures by the Roman Catholic Church seriously curtailed evangelical work.
In 1967, laws that prohibited the public proclamation of evangelical beliefs were repealed. When General Juan Velasco seized power in 1968, free exercise of religious faith became legal. Velasco’s aim was to establish a “pluralistic social democracy dedicated to Christian and human values.” Before the end of his eight-year tenure, however, ominous rumblings sounded in his speeches about politically organizing “basic structure groups”—churches, clubs, charities. “Christian” was heard less frequently, and “socialist” grew more common. Many Roman Catholic bishops became restive.
General Morales Bermúdez, who took the presidency from Velasco, said publicly he would continue in the socialist pattern, but sought warmer relations with the Catholic hierarchy. Some Protestant leaders feared a crack-down on their activities. But several local observers think the current difficulty in acquiring visas for Protestant missionaries has nothing to do with Roman Catholic opposition, but rather is a vestige of the vociferous anti-Americanism of the Velasco regime.
The ideas and values of Protestants are well known throughout Peru. Their churches and pastors are theological conservatives. Yet despite the freedom to preach and practice faith in God publicly and privately, the evangelical movement has not progressed as well as in some South American nations. This is largely because of painful historic divisions. The National Evangelical Council is seeking to remedy denominational mistrust but sometimes gets caught in crossfire between national churches and missionary organizations.
The Peruvian Roman Catholic Church is not united either, and has at least four visible groups. Scores of North American priests, many of them Maryknollers, are militant progressives who want greater social involvement for the church. A theology of liberation movement has been strong among younger clerics, but may be losing its appeal. Official power still rests with the conservatives, led by Cardinal Juan Landázuri.
Charismatics are the growing segment of the Catholic Church in Peru. Being very few in number ten years ago, they now meet in scores of large meetings in many cities. Wycliffe missionary Al Shannon conducts a weekly Bible class for 600 Roman Catholic charismatics in Lima. Last January at a retreat, sixty priests received a spiritual blessing that, in the words of one, “is the same as what you evangelicals call the new birth.” Sources high in the Catholic hierarchy believe the charismatic movement offers more hope than the theology of liberation, “which has caused us nothing but trouble.”
Evangelicals Arana and Alvarado recognize that they are few among 100 delegates. But they expressed their motivation in a pre-election statement: “It is through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ that the new man is born—the man that Peru so desperately needs in order to achieve the positive transformation our people desire. This is an opportunity to fulfill our function of salt and light.”
Religion In Transit
Their meetings lacked the blessings of either the Vatican or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But the 2,000 delegates attending the Second Conference on the Ordination of Roman Catholic Women last month in Baltimore weren’t bothered and perhaps yelled a little louder. They want women priests and full rights for women within the church. Until that happens, the Catholic lay women and nuns (and about 150 sympathetic priests and laymen) at the conference will consider such as-yet-to-be-approved recommendations as a national boycott of church collections and a nationwide boycott next April 29 of all masses in which a male priest presides.
The Annual Council of the Seventh-day Adventist Church has voted down a request for formation of a separate administrative structure for black members. Blacks make up one-fifth of the half-million-member body, and most belong to predominately black churches.
Personalia
Already serving a one-year term in a Soviet labor camp for “parasitism,” dissident Baptist Peter Vins was threatened with an additional seven years’ imprisonment for allegedly distributing anti-Soviet propaganda in the camp. Vins, 22, the son of imprisoned Baptist pastor Georgi Vins, has declared a hunger strike.
Robert P. Dugan has become director of the National Association of Evangelicals’ office of public affairs in Washington. An immediate past president of the Conservative Baptist Association of America, Dugan will team with Floyd Robertson, now the associate director.
G. Douglas Young, 70, founder of the 31-year-old American Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem, has retired as president, but will continue to teach Judeo-Christian studies there. His successor is George Giacumakis, 41, history professor at California State University at Fullerton.
DEATHS
ROBIN E. NIXON, 47, principal of St. John’s College in Nottingham, England, an Anglican evangelical who specialized in New Testament studies and edited The Churchman: in Nottingham, of a heart attack.
M. SEARLE BATES, 81, internationally-known China expert and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) missionary there for 30 years, who was writing a history of twentieth century Christianity in China; on October 28, of a heart attack.
World Scene
Two Southern Baptist Home Mission Board officials in October visited Cuba for the first time in seventeen years. They found that the West Cuba Baptist Convention had increased from 100 to 105 churches, with five in formation.
The Church of England voted to bar women from the priesthood at its General Synod in London last month, despite the pleas of Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan and a majority in the House of Bishops and the House of Laity. Women’s ordination was opposed by a majority in the House of Clergy, however (approval by all three was needed), who argued that the step would harm Christian unity, particularly with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Synod rules bar broaching of the issue again for five years.
Soviet authorities have granted permission for the importation of 25,000 Russian Bibles—the largest shipment of Bibles ever made to the Soviet Union. The import permit, which also allows shipment of two thousand Russian concordances, was granted to the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptist. The supplier is the United Bible Societies. Russian Baptists have obtained about 10,000 Bibles, printed during the last few years by the Orthodox Press in Moscow, but the demand for Scriptures considerably exceeded the supply.
The nine largest denominations in Ethiopia—including Orthodox and Catholic, as well as Protestant—have founded a Council for Cooperation of Churches in Ethiopia. Its main purpose: joint efforts at improving “the welfare of needy people” in Ethiopia. Ethiopia faces what may be its worst drought and famine. More than four million persons are near starvation in north-central Tigre Province and the Wollo region of central Ethiopia.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church has closed its Middle East college in Beirut, Lebanon. The school had been occupied of late by Christian militia forces involved in that nation’s civil war. The denomination’s Afro-Mideast Division plans to reestablish the school near Nairobi in Nandy Hills, Kenya.
Muslim Arabs living in Israel were allowed to participate in the Hajj—the pilgrimage to Mecca—last month for the first time since Israel was created thirty years ago.
Church leaders in Burma have at last been given government permission to participate in international church gatherings. Ending a fifteen-year ban on travel, Burma Council of Churches general secretary U Aung Khin was granted permission to attend a World Council of Churches regional meeting in Singapore in October.
