Void has allowed liberation theologians to preempt field.
His eggs and toast were getting cold, but Marcelino Ortiz doesn’t seem to mind. He is getting warmed up on a subject about which he feels strongly, as, he says, do many other Latin American Christians.
“The vast majority of Latin evangelicals are conservative and biblical,” he explains during an interview. Despite this, he says, the much-publicized liberation theologians create a mistaken impression that they represent the church. What is needed now is an organized voice that more truly “reflects what the local churches are thinking.”
That voice and organization may be provided by CONELA, says Ortiz, who is a Mexico City Presbyterian pastor and staff member of the Luis Palau Evangelistic Team.
Ortiz is executive secretary of the CONELA ad hoc committee, formed out of a meeting of 40 or so Latin American evangelicals attending the world evangelization conference a year ago in Pattaya, Thailand. The group asked at that time for a continent-wide gathering of evangelical leaders, or “Consultation of Evangelicals in Latin America” (hence, the name CONELA). The ad hoc committee was given a mandate to plan the gathering.
CONELA leaders are aware of tremendous social and political turmoil in their part of the world. They believe Christians should be concerned, and working to rectify problems. However, they believe the primary focuses for a group such as CONELA should be evangelism and building up the local church. Ortiz says these emphases are neglected and sometimes forgotten, but are badly needed.
“Most Latin American pastors don’t read Time or CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Many haven’t gone to seminary or had evangelical training,” explained Ortiz. CONELA can provide these church leaders with ministry-strengthening ideas, resource persons, and workshops they would not otherwise receive. Organizers already are talking about forming local and national pastors’ associations, but a decision on whether CONELA will continue as an organization will be decided by the approximately 300 delegates invited to next year’s meeting.
Ad hoc committee president Asdrúbal Ríos, 68, of Venezuela, is pleased by statistics showing the growth of Latin American churches. But, he says, a corresponding growth in inner spiritual life is not there. For that reason, he believes CONELA’s thrust should be “deepening the spiritual life” of Latin American congregations.
Ríos, former president of the Venezuelan churches begun by TEAM (OVICE) and editor of The Morning Star magazine, believes most grassroots Latin evangelicals aren’t even aware of the meaning of liberation theology. “They think it refers only to liberation from sin,” he says. Yet, he asserted, when they find out otherwise, they reject it.
While they do not want to be regarded as an “against” group, CONELA leaders provide the conservatives’ alternative to the Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI) In Formation, which has World Council of Churches ties. Ríos, for instance, says he would not support CLAI for fear it might provide money to guerrilla groups in Latin America as the WCC did in Africa.
The CONELA ad hoc committee has issued a statement deploring violence by both the left and the right, and rejecting it as an option for the Christian church. Still, CONELA will not be a resolution-making group, Ortiz says, explaining that the violence statement was meant to answer the churches’ questions in light of the recent slayings of pastors in El Salvador and Guatemala and of Wycliffe missionary Chet Bitterman.
Rather than the theology of liberation (Ortiz says certain liberation theologians see basic evils as structural and economic, not man’s heart), CONELA will develop a “theology of salt and light,” with Christians effecting change quietly through their witness in the church and secular world.
CONELA’s evangelical credentials include adoption of the Lausanne Covenant as its basic doctrinal statement. The interdenominational board of advisers includes well-known leaders Bruno Frigoli, Assemblies of God leader formerly in Bolivia; Brazilian Baptist evangelist Nilson Fanini; Argentine church leaders Raúl Caballero and Samuel Libert; Guatemalan professor and writer Emilio Nuñez; Mexican leader Juan Isais; and evangelist Luis Palau. The cooperation of Protestants with evangelical Catholics is possible on an individual level, Ortiz says, but not on one of organization because of continuing distrust between the two groups.
CONELA will be apolitical, says Ortiz. He warned against Latin churches being made tontos utiles—“useful fools”—by governments using them for their own advantage. A danger is that churches identified too closely with one regime will be persecuted by a new and opposing one that suddenly takes power. “North Americans haven’t understood how powerful governments are here,” said Ortiz.
Possible functions of CONELA, should it become an established organization, include promoting theological education, serving as a vehicle for communication between evangelicals, and providing for cooperative evangelistic and social projects.
Participants at the continent-wide meeting scheduled for early next year in a centrally located Latin nation will do intensive Bible study with reference to the Latin American situation. There also will be workshops with case studies on church growth, and study of the church’s mission in Latin America. The invited delegates will be representatives of evangelical denominations and service agencies, along with local church representatives. The idea is to bring people who are “doing things and having an impact at the grassroots,” not big-name figureheads or unrepresentative theologians, said an organizer.
The ad hoc committee expects Latin American groups and individuals to pay for at least 31 percent of conference costs—a high percentage for similar Third World meetings. The rest of the funds will come from U.S. and other evangelical sources. Because of the costs and logistics involved in a continent-wide meeting, CONELA organizers admit their task is huge. In addition, the impact and lasting results they seek are not always accomplished in an ordinary week-long meeting.
In Austrian Ski Resort Town …
Youths Glide Out Ahead Of Elders’ Remnant Outlook
Sixteen hundred Austrian youth jammed the idyllic Alpine village of Schladming over the May Day holiday to learn how to share their faith with non-Christians. The theme of the Credo 81 youth congress was taken from Romans 1:16: “I am not ashamed of the gospel.…” The young people who attended the congress were urged repeatedly to adopt an evangelistic lifestyle, learning to live as missionaries in their own land.
Credo 81 was conceived and directed by a committee of Austrian Lutherans, Mennonites, Brethren, and Baptists, with some input from foreign missionaries. About half the young people came from Lutheran churches, one-fourth from the various “free-church” denominations and missions, and about one-fourth from parachurch organizations such as the YMCA, Inter-Varsity, and the Volksmission. There was a sprinkling among many groups, however, of young people who would still identify themselves as Roman Catholic. Registration fees covered about half the cost of the congress, with the Austrian and German Lutheran churches picking up the rest of the tab.
Principal speakers were Ulrich Parzany from Essen, and Konrad Eissler from Stuttgart, Germany. Both are “youth pastors,” a term that often signifies someone with a special ability to communicate to young people. He is a youth evangelist rather than a staff member in a local church. Parzany spoke each evening about growing in faith, and Eissler presented a series of studies in II Timothy. More than 400 people from the surrounding mountain communities attended the evening sessions.
In addition to the plenary sessions, there was a series of seminars that dealt with a wide range of subjects, and a Congress Course that all attended. Seminars dealt with such topics as marriage and family, street evangelism, ministering to the drug culture, Christian social responsibility, world missions, church growth, “future-oriented lifestyle,” and ideology and Zietgeist (the spirit of the time). In the Congress Course, the young people wrote out their personal testimonies and learned how to share them with others. They also learned how to initiate an evangelistic conversation, answer objections to faith, and explain a personal relationship to Christ. Also stressed throughout the congress was the need for a daily time of quiet, Bible reading, and prayer.
Schladming is situated between the towering Tauern range and the mighty Dachstein. Known principally as a world-class ski area (the 1982 World Championships will be held there next winter), it possesses an interesting history as well. Because it was a center of Austrian Protestantism, it was burned to the ground in 1525 by the troops of Emperor Ferdinand I. Even today, about half the people claim allegiance to the Lutheran church—in sharp contrast to the rest of Austria, where about 89 percent call themselves Roman Catholic, and only about 6 percent are Protestant.
The Protestant church was strong in Austria in the early years of the Reformation, but was virtually crushed out of existence by the stern measures of the Counter-Reformation. Isolated pockets of secret Protestant “heresy,” however, survived the 180 years of persecution in remote mountain pockets like Schladming. Relief from the torture, martyrdom, and deportation came only in 1781, when Emperor Josef II issued the “Edict of Toleration,” allowing open expression of Protestant faith. Even then, the Protestants were severely limited, able only to worship in “prayer houses,” which could not have spires, round windows, or bells. The result of this suppression has been a “remnant” mentality that has resulted in no significant church growth occuring among Austrian Protestants.
Credo 81, with its emphasis on an unashamed witness to the lordship of Christ, stands in sharp contrast to this “remnant” mentality. Coming as it did in the bicentennial year of the “Edict of Toleration,” it may signal a new beginning for vital faith in Austria, coupling regeneration with reformation, and replacing dead religious tradition with living, vibrant faith in Jesus Christ. The prospect of 1,600 Austrian young people prepared and equipped to share their faith is exciting. Only time will tell what lasting effect this first-ever evangelism congress will have on the religious climate in Austria.
DEVERE K. CURTISS
World Scene
Pope John Paul II met recently with a personal envoy of Mexico president José López Portillo, even though the Mexican government does not have official relations with the Vatican and emphasizes strict church-state separation. The Mexican daily, Novedadas, had no details of the content of the Vatican meeting, but it did say the presidential envoy Jorge Martińez Flores, holds no government post.
Acting Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas of El Salvador voiced satisfaction over the arrests of six military men in connection with the December 2 murders there of three American nuns and a lay Catholic social worker. Rivera, who took office a year ago after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, said the arrests meant “justice is beginning” in El Salvador. The arrests came after a joint investigation by U.S. and Salvadorian authorities.
Thousands of pilgrims are flocking to the tiny Nicaraguan village of Cuapa, where a peasant named Bernardo Martinez claims to have seen and spoken with an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The Catholic hierarchy so far has reserved judgment. Nicaraguan Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo told a reporter the church must exercise “great prudence” in such things, but noted the Virgin Mary “has never appeared to great intellectuals and thinkers. She has always shown herself to humble people.”
Portuguese Baptists climaxed a two-year church growth and evangelism effort last month by bringing 20 Brazilian pastors into a two-week nationwide campaign. Nilson Fanini, pastor of the 3,000-seat First Baptist Church of Niteroi in Brazil, preached at mass rallies in Lisbon and Porto.
The Roman Catholic church is deeply divided over the hunger strike deaths in Northern Ireland. Are they morally justified or are they a form of suicide, which is barred by the church? Irish Catholic clergy have tolerated, if not outright approved, the hunger strike as a tool in the struggle for independence at least since the Easter Riots of 1916. But Cardinal Basil Hume of England, in an April 27 letter, condemned the strikes as “a form of violence [that] surely cannot be condoned by the church as being in accordance with God’s will for man.” Last year the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith affirmed that “intentionally causing one’s own death [is] … equally as wrong as murder.” But it also added that “one must clearly distinguish suicide from the sacrifice of one’s life … for a higher cause, such as God’s glory, the salvation of souls, or the service of one’s brethren.”
Two main Dutch Reformed denominations have denounced evangelistic efforts currently being launched in their country. Attraction to the Evangelical Alliance in the Netherlands’ evangelization year and Campus Crusade for Christ’s Project ’82 apparently led to a recent day-long meeting by the Heervormde and Gereformeerde Kerks. The Kerks considered evangelistic activities of member groups of the alliance, and recommended that their churches not participate. They deplored the manner in which, they said, the Bible would be reduced to a matter of personal salvation, further estranging non-Christians from the churches and the gospel. Members of the Evangelical Alliance include the Salvation Army, Youth for Christ, TEAR Fund (a relief agency), and the Navigators.
Spanish authorities have banned the showing of a film that portrays the annual religious festival in an Andalusian town. After a right-wing politician said the film Rocío “gravely insults and ridicules the Catholic religion,” a Seville judge ruled it could not be shown in the Anadalusian provinces. The documentary filmed the annual romería (procession) in Almonte. One scene depicts several thousand frenzied men trying to seize the chariot bearing the fragile, carved wooden image of the Virgin Mary that is the festival’s object of veneration. A film critic, Fernando Lara, said “one has to rub one’s eyes to believe” such scenes of fanaticism and drunken revelry were “really happening in a country that calls itself ‘civilized’ in the final stretch of the twentieth century.”
Greater Europe Mission plans to open another Bible institute this fall—catering to Eastern Europeans. Based in Vienna, Austria, conveniently close to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, the European Bible Institute will be headed by Michael Johnson, a GEM missionary among Yugoslavians since 1974. Several hundred thousand Eastern European refugees have settled in Vienna, creating a base for the new school, which will offer extension courses that may be taken in Eastern Europe for credit.
The May 13 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II failed to swing a significant sympathy vote behind the position of the Catholic church in Italy’s May 18 referendum. Voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to scrap Italy’s abortion law. The church last led a drive to repeal the law in 1974. It is clear that its influence over Italian life has slipped further since then.
The Russian Orthodox Church has named Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk as chairman of its Department of External Church Relations. He succeeds Metropolitan Juvenaly, who resigned for health reasons. Ukrainian Christians in the West have often criticized Filaret for what they perceive as collaboration with the antireligious policies of the Soviet government. In a 1976 interview, Filaret criticized dissenting Christians in the Soviet Union for promoting church-state confrontations.
A young leader of the True and Free Seventh-day Adventists, considered illegal by the authorities, has been sentenced to five years in a Soviet labor camp. Rostislav Galetsky, 33, was arrested at a Moscow railway station in July 1980, after eluding arrest for more than five years.
Nigerian Phillip Usman has taken over management of the second largest Christian bookstore chain in the world. The new director of ECWA Productions Limited, the continuation of the Sudan Interior Mission’s literature ministries in Nigeria, succeeded SIM missionary Gordon Stanley in supervising the 36-store chain, which grosses in the neighborhood of $10 million annually.
Anglicans in Tanzania have prepared 15 airstrips as part of an unprecedented attempt to take the Christian message to the country’s most remote communities this summer. Bishop Yohana Madinda of the Diocese of Central Tanganyika says the diocese’s 120 ordained clergy and 1,500 evangelists will be flown by Mission Aviation Fellowship pilots to designated locations for evangelistic meetings. An ambitious five-year program also establishes a lay training center, regional training seminars for the evangelists, and has produced an innovative Cassette Bible School, with courses recorded in the numerous tribal languages.
Seventy new churches have sprung up along Kenya’s coastal strip, according to an Africa Inland Mission report. The region, inhabited by Arabs and Somalis (mostly Muslim), Asians (mostly Hindu), and coastal Africans (mostly pagan or Muslimized), has traditionally been unresponsive. The Africa Inland Church has established a Coast Bible Institute to meet leadership needs in the new churches.
Refugee camps in normally arid Somalia were inundated last month after rare heavy rainfall. Flooding from the Juba and Shebelli Rivers has wreaked havoc with what agriculture there is; it necessitated moving the camps, and caused malaria outbreaks. Christian relief agencies are responding with assistance to this latest crisis.
The Church of South India has been convulsed by legal disputes over the past two years. The worst snarl—in Karnataka Central Diocese, between the executive committee and the superintendent of the CSI hospital—was resolved in April. A negotiating committee secured the withdrawal of all lawsuits, and submission of the disputes to the CSI synod, the church’s supreme controlling body, for hearing and settlement.
Church buildings are being assaulted in Northeast India. A correspondent reports that the church in Mopaghat was burned to the ground during the night of April 14, just 10 days after its construction. Four previous buildings of the same congregation have also been destroyed. The church in Lungho village was torn down at about the same time by local leaders, without opposition from the authorities.
A bid to ship 250 tons of wheat flour to Vietnam by the Mennonite Central Committee was disapproved last month by the U.S. government. It is the first time in the postwar period that the license for a shipment of humanitarian aid materials to the hard-pressed country has been denied. State Department officials said the shipment was blocked because Vietnam is occupying neighboring Cambodia.
A new antenna service to China at the Far Eastern Broadcasting Company’s facility in the Philippines appears to have increased reception and mail response. Engineer Paul Reynolds says that the new log periodic antenna, installed in March, “will effectively increase our broadcast output 7 to 10 times.” The FEBC currently beams 29¼ frequency hours of programming to the People’s Republic.
