Observers of Latin America seem clear on one thing: The Protestant church’s explosive growth is leaving more in its wake than crowded churches. “Could the surprising evangelical groundswell affect the course of events in Latin America?” asks David Stoll in Is Latin America Turning Protestant? While the answer may be increasingly obvious, it is not always clear how Protestantism is altering the social fabric of the region.
In the early days of mission in Latin America, new life in Christ led to responsible citizenship and good works on behalf of others. Changed lives also produced upwardly mobile people. The evidences of “redemption and uplift” can be found today in hospitals, schools, and orphanages, as well as in the significant number of well-trained professionals who are Protestant. Their changed lives even won evangelicals the sometimes grudging respect of nonbelievers.
But since midcentury, this picture has been changing. Deepening poverty and, ironically, rapid church growth have together dramatically changed the face of the church. Evangelicals’ effectiveness has been weakened by five factors.
• Superficial discipleship. Church membership has often grown faster than leaders’ ability to accommodate that growth. They often do not have the time, energy, and resources both to disciple recent converts and to train new leaders. Over time, this may result in slower growth and false teaching. One study found that growth in Costa Rica may already have stagnated. In the same country, a Pentecostal sect teaches “celestial marriage,” a form of polygamy available only to the leadership.
• Lack of distinctiveness from surrounding culture. Today it is harder to distinguish evangelical conduct from that of nonevangelicals. As marriage laws become more liberal, evangelicals are getting more divorces. And their business ethics are less strict than before. If, as David Stoll maintains, Protestant growth is due in part to family-oriented evangelism, the breakdown in family values may hamper growth in the future.
• Lack of identity. Dramatic geopolitical changes are producing a crisis of ideology. Like other institutions, the church is searching for new societal models to replace discredited ones. It tends to react to social crises, rather than respond to them with a coherent vision. Middle-class Christians, in particular, are searching desperately for security; some find it in materialism and in novel religious options, such as occultism and the “health-and-wealth” gospel.
• Slowdown in upward mobility. The economic crisis has made it more difficult for Protestants, like all others, to achieve progress. Soon, evangelicals may not be any more upwardly mobile than segments of the general population.
• Increasingly activist and simplistic responses to social crisis. When a positive response to the gospel provided opportunities for social betterment, evangelicals were content with the existing social order. Now that this is no longer the case, evangelicals are becoming politically active.
But this activism may sow the seeds of its own destruction. Naïve and inexperienced Protestants tend to apply inflexible, improper solutions to complex social problems. And their activity may frequently be self-serving rather than focused on the public good. Recently in Brazil, for example, evangelical politicians were accused of selling their votes to aspiring presidential candidates in exchange for large donations to their churches.
Can Evangelicals Make A Difference?
These factors have indeed made it difficult for evangelicals to make a difference. But they have not made it impossible.
Evangelicals gain political strength not only through their numbers, but also because their values of honesty, frugality, and fairness hold widening appeal. Even radical Protestants and Catholics who lose members of base communities (communalistic bodies often associated with liberation theology) to Pentecostal churches speak approvingly of the resulting lifestyle changes. Broken marriages and divided communities are healed, violence is reduced, and socially acceptable conduct becomes the norm.
Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how effectively middle-class evangelicals can change society politically—without succumbing to greed and infatuation with power.
Christians at the grassroots level may make the more significant impact in the long run. Growing numbers of evangelicals are involved in creative models of witness through health education, cholera prevention, care for drug addicts and persons with AIDS, food cooperatives, justice and peace initiatives—the list is quite long.
Christians have made more than their share of mistakes during the first 500 years of evangelization in Latin America—not the least of which were genocide in the name of Christ during earlier centuries and complicity with oppressive governments more recently. If we are to continue to make a positive difference in Latin America, we must not resist change but recognize and prepare for the challenges of the next century. We must base responsible discipleship on the model of the Suffering Servant, not on that of self-service. Otherwise, we risk repeating those tragic mistakes.
Whatever Came Of The “People’S Church”?
Since the 1960s, Latin American liberation theologians have argued that the church must make the poor’s struggle for justice a priority. They have argued that the mission of the church must be understood in the light of historical struggles for liberation. Some even turned to Marxism for insights. How is liberation theology faring today?
C. René Padilla is an evangelical who knows. He worked with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students for 22 years, and he now serves as general secretary for the Latin American Theological Fraternity. CHRISTIANITY TODAY project editor Thomas Giles spoke with Padilla about the status and future of liberation theology in Latin America.
What are the basic principles of Latin American liberation theology?
Liberation theology in Latin America has developed mainly in Roman Catholic circles in the last 30 years as a response to poverty and injustice. Its proponents believed that theology had become too unrelated to people’s real needs. They wanted to make the gospel more relevant to society.
How do theologians do that?
They encourage liberation from oppressive economic and ecclesiastical structures. Latin America’s poverty, they argue, is not the result of culture, but of unjust economic relations. At the time of the conquest and colonization, Spain and Portugal exploited Latin America’s resources; later, the same thing was done by such world powers as England and the U.S.
When they keep power out of the hands of the common people, church structures also reflect that oppression; they alienate rather than liberate. So the task is to make the church less hierarchical and to allow people to become active participants.
From a biblical standpoint, what are liberation theology’s strengths and weaknesses?
Its greatest strength has been its concern for the poor. The God of love, who reveals himself in Jesus Christ, is also the God of justice. That means concern for the victims of injustice—not just the sinners, but the sinned against. Justice, therefore, must be at the very center of the mission of the church.
Liberation theology also has shown how evil transforms societies—not just through individuals but also through larger structures.
However, the tendency has been to reduce the gospel to matters of politics and socioeconomics, without enough emphasis on the individual. Where Western theology often values the individual above community, liberation theology overemphasizes the community, losing sight of the individual.
Another weakness in liberation theology has been the assumption that since Latin America is a “Christian” region, there was no need to preach the gospel.
Finally, liberationists have too little emphasized a cultural explanation for poverty. To be sure, much of Latin America’s poverty can be blamed on an unjust economic world order. But that is not the whole story. Some of Latin America’s poverty can be explained by internal, cultural problems. Liberation theology largely has ignored this.
What kind of relationship exists between evangelicals and liberationists?
Many conservative and procapitalist evangelical churches in Latin America have reacted negatively to the movement. Liberation theologians have also been rather critical of evangelical churches; they have seen evangelicals as intruders who have no right to be in Latin America.
But in recent years, some of liberation theology’s insights have influenced Christians who wrestle with questions of poverty. Some of these insights have even penetrated evangelical theology.
Why has the Vatican been so opposed to the movement?
When common people become involved in the life of the church, they can undermine hierarchical authority. When prominent liberation theologian Leonardo Boff resigned from his order, he wrote that the Vatican had finally killed every hope for change, and that there was no way for him to continue.
How has the movement changed in ideology or practice in recent years?
At first, there was a tendency among many toward a Marxist historical project. Some claimed the church had to take part in a socialist revolution to be relevant. Now there is less emphasis on Marxist dogma. Many theologians have begun to see the importance of spirituality, prayer, and biblical reflection—within the struggle for justice. Some liberationist exegesis is now amazingly evangelical; it places more emphasis on Scripture and God’s transcendence.
This doesn’t mean, though, that there’s no need for social change; poverty is as rampant as before. And the Bible demands that Christians face this in a responsible manner—with solidarity, compassion, and justice.
Keeping The Faithful
Nicolás Guambo traveled from his home in the Ecuadorian Andes to tropical Guayaquil on the Pacific coast. There he visited an evangelical church and publicly professed faith in Christ. Guambo, a Quichua Indian, said he wanted to go home immediately and testify to friends.
But the pastor, aware of anti-Protestant sentiments in the Chimborazo Province, asked him if there were any other evangelical believers in his community. When Guambo said no, the pastor started to weep. He laid his hands on Guambo and prayed, “God, protect this man.”
Guambo returned to his community during a wild-drinking religious feast, and his testimony fell on drunken ears. The villagers beat him and forced liquor down his throat. Shortly, Guambo’s new faith was foundering.
Disillusioned, he returned to Guayaquil and asked his pastor friend for help. The remedy: four months of solid Bible teaching. When Guambo went home this time, he recalls, “No one could stop me. I began to preach whether people wanted me to or not. And people converted.”
Over 25 years have passed since Guambo’s conversion; today he is a leader in his fast-growing denomination. The four-month discipleship stint paid off.
Like Guambo’s former pastor in Guayaquil, many Latin American church leaders are acutely aware of the need to train new converts—especially now, as thousands of new people enter the churches. While evangelical church leaders relish this boom, they are also aware of a “revolving back door.”
A 1989 survey in Costa Rica conducted by an opinion-research firm found 8 percent of the population said they “had been” evangelicals, but then had either returned to Roman Catholicism, joined one of the sects, or left organized religion altogether. Similar stories can be heard throughout Latin America.
Latin evangelicals leave the church for varied reasons. These include: ill-equipped church leaders; shallow teaching; the limited appeal of emotional mass meetings; authoritarian church leadership; and burnout in churches that have frequent services.
Compounding the problem is the fact that leaving the church is easier than ever before; becoming an evangelical in Latin America used to mean a radical break with the prevailing culture. There was no turning back. But because of the more relaxed religious climate in much of the region today, it is easier to cross from Catholicism to Protestantism—and then cross back again.
Stopping the revolving back door
Aware of such problems, a number of evangelical groups have refined their strategies. Because Latin evangelicals have always used Bible training as their main method of discipling laity and leaders, Bible institutes and extension programs are often the preferred means of addressing the problems. One denomination in Colombia, for example, took specific steps to train and better prepare its mostly rural and uneducated pastors, who were hard pressed to minister to the churches’ growing number of college students and professionals.
When a 1980 survey by the Association of Evangelical Churches of the Caribbean showed that 80 percent of its pastors had not finished primary school and that 80 percent had no formal Bible training, the denomination launched a program offering both primary-school and theological education by extension. Between 1980 and 1990, more than two thousand church leaders studied in the program.
A number of the Latin Protestant churches have also scrutinized ways mass evangelism can be effective. The growing Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) churches in Lima, Peru, for example, have built a church-growth strategy around ongoing evangelistic campaigns, with equal emphasis on new-convert training. New believers enrolled in Bible classes are nurtured in home cell groups. The denomination has raised a crop of young pastors through its evening Bible institute.
The results speak for themselves. In Greater Lima, since 1973, the C&MA has grown from one congregation with 150 members to some 30 congregations with a worshiping community of 25,000, And the C&MA churches have maintained a much higher retention rate—20 percent—than have more traditional programs.
People will always fall away from the truth, as Christ’s parable of the sower suggests. But Latin evangelicalism keeps growing—backsliders notwithstanding—because of sowing by zealous people like Nicolás Guambo.
Religious zealots and village leaders tried to stop his preaching. They even hired a witch doctor to cast a deadly spell on him, but the witch doctor said the job would take at least six months.
“No!” his persecutors protested. “In six months, he’ll start six more churches.”
By John Maust, editor of Latin America Evangelist magazine.
