By all accounts, something dramatic is happening in Latin America. The presence of Protestants in this once-over-whelmingly Catholic region has grown from 15 million in the late 1960s to at least 40 million. Most of the congregations of evangélicos are growing through a simple, unsophisticated proclamation of the gospel. They lack the financial, political, technical, or ideological power we associate with large-scale institutional success. They do not even have the prestige of a clear, historical tradition. What they do have—in abundance—is a conviction and missionary passion that intrigues religious and nonreligious observers alike.
The effects are not limited to swelling Protestant church rolls, but they extend to politics, society, and the entire religious character of the region. While Brazil and Peru, for example, have had some tradition of Protestant participation in politics, the trend in the entire region is now accelerating. Jorge Serrano Elías, an evangelical charismatic, recently became president of Guatemala, and Jaime Ortiz Hurtado, an evangelical lawyer and theological educator, was elected to the Constitutional Assembly of Colombia. Developments like these show the movement of a minority into a new status of visibility at the very time the masses have lost confidence in traditional parties. The Protestant presence is presenting an unexpected political alternative during a time of cultural transition and ideological confusion.
Social effects have been profound as well. Long before Protestants reached their current political visibility, the social impact of their presence was acknowledged by anyone familiar with Latin America. Especially significant was their work with schools, rural medicine, agrarian reform, bilingual education, sports, literacy, and rights of Indian communities. The same work goes on today, but on a far larger scale.
Perhaps the greatest impact is seen in the religious landscape of the region. While Catholics are celebrating five centuries of missionary work in Latin America, the Catholic hierarchy’s favored place in society is vulnerable.
Catholicism has long seen its religious conquest of this continent as a compensation for the loss of Northern Europe to the Protestant Reformation. But already more Catholics have become Protestants in Latin America than in Europe during the sixteenth-century Reformation. Will this popular Protestantism become the depository of the heritage of the Reformation, now that mainline Protestantism is retreating in other parts of the world?
Catholics also worry that after five centuries of presence in the region (where 42 percent of the world’s Catholics reside), a large foreign missionary force is still necessary to keep the church going. Catholic missiologists lament that a Catholic missionary force should be going from Latin America to the world’s unevangelized regions. A Catholic publication recently noted that the proportion of missionaries sent from Latin America “does not even reach 2 percent of the total missionary force in the world.”
The Misunderstood Protestants
Why has Protestantism grown so dramatically? Explanations have been many and varied. Two prominent theories for understanding the growth can be dismissed immediately.
The first, the “conspiracy theory,” tries to explain the Protestant presence as part of a foreign plot, and it is sometimes advanced by Latin American Catholic leaders. The theory has taken different forms. After 1948, during the years of violence in Colombia, hundreds of Protestants were killed, usually accused of being politically liberal and thereby opening the door to communism. Up until the 1950s, Colombian and Argentine bishops would warn against the “liberal-Masonic-Protestant” conspiracy.
After the 1960s, the conspiracy theory took a new turn. A Catholic journalist in Latinamerica Press summarizes it: “According to its most extreme version, Protestant sects bankrolled by the CIA are sent to Latin America to destroy liberation theology and further U.S. imperialism.”
Franz Damen, a Belgian Catholic missionary to Bolivia, has called for a dismissal of the conspiracy theory. Damen does not rule out that there may be politicians in the United States trying to manipulate Latin American Pentecostal churches. However, he observes that the Protestant groups that grow faster are either indigenous to the continent, or, if they had an origin in North America, they have quickly become “Latin-Americanized” in both leadership and financing. Damen urges his Catholic colleagues not to speak of Protestant growth with a term like “avalanche”—which implies “the horrible experience of a gigantic mass that in a sudden, violent, and uncontrollable way throws itself upon an innocent and unarmed population.” Instead, he insists, Protestants enjoy “a relatively good reception on the part of the people.”
The other way the growth is misunderstood has do with what we may call sociologism. I am not referring here to sociological study in general but to the kind of approach that evaluates and analyzes the movement mainly from the perspective of a political project embraced by the researcher. If the social effect of the movement is unfavorable to the researcher’s political project or orientation, the analysis and the evaluation will be predictably negative. He or she will employ a “politically correct” selection of data in the research and show hostility toward the movement in the presentation of results. Latin pastor Juan Sépulveda has noted in the International Review of Mission that sociologists’ biases against Latin Pentecostalism are sometimes shown in expressions such as “opium, domination via religion, religious proclamation of social conformism, and ‘refuge of the masses.’ ”
David Martin’s much-publicized Tongues of Fire has done a service in arguing that an observer must avoid “framing” the religious experience of the poor people “in language of covert political hostility, or encasing them in grand notions of the right or main path of social evolution.” This warning is especially significant now in light of the collapse of the Marxist “grand notions” that have dominated the academic world of Latin American studies (see “Whatever Came of the ‘People’s Church’?” p. 36).
This “sociologistic” approach not only is simplistic, it also does not do justice to the theological elements of a movement that is explicitly Christian. It does not take adequate account of the self-understanding of the people that are being studied, the plausibility of their world view, and their interpretation of the Bible. It does not leave room for the freedom of the Spirit, who is the one who drives the church to mission.
Did You Say Protestant?
When we speak of Protestantism in Latin America, what does it mean? It would be more precise to refer to a Protestant movement that has several distinct expressions.
• The first type is transplanted Protestantism, formed by the ethnic churches that came with European migrants, such as the Lutherans of Brazil or the Mennonites of Paraguay.
• The second is missionary Protestantism, which developed as a result of two types of intentional evangelistic activity. The first includes churches resulting from the work of missions from large denominations or mainline churches, such as the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, which started in the late-nineteenth century and flourished before World War II. The second includes churches spawned by missionary groups or new denominations, British and North American, that flourished after World War II, such as the Central American Mission, the Gospel Missionary Union, or the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
• Third, Pentecostal Protestantism. This also resulted from two movements: Pentecostal churches that came from abroad, such as the Assemblies of God or the Swedish Pentecostals, and revival movements indigenous to Latin America itself, such as the Methodist Pentecostal Church in Chile or Brasil para Cristo in Brazil.
This third type has shown the most spectacular growth among the region’s poor urban people over the past 30 years. In its social composition and style of ministry, it can be described as “popular Protestantism.” More recently, a growing number of independent charismatic churches that do not easily fit into this typology have emerged. They cater to the middle and upper-middle classes; some are linked to charismatic groups in the U.S.
Ecumenicals and evangelicals
When it comes to interchurch cooperation for mission, global relations, and representation before civil authorities, most Protestants—though not all evangelicals—have grouped around two movements. First is an ecumenical movement linked to the World Council of Churches (WCC). Its most visible expression is the Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI). Several transplanted churches as well as those related to what North Americans call mainline denominations, and a handful of evangelical and Pentecostal churches, are members of CLAI and the WCC.
The second is the evangelical movement, in which we can place most evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Some of these churches are linked through a loosely connected fellowship called Confraternity of Evangelical Churches (CONELA), which is associated with the World Evangelical Fellowship. Some members of CONELA would call themselves “fundamentalists,” but the majority prefer the name evangélico, which in the way they have come now to use it corresponds to the English term evangelical.
By Samuel Escobar.
Interpreting The Great Growth
Long before the growth of popular Protestantism drew the attention of the media and of scholars like David Martin, Protestant missiologists had been trying to interpret and learn from the phenomenon.
I have found it valuable to compare studies of the growth with the observations of Catholic missiologists who are missionaries in Latin America and who, out of a deep pastoral concern, have gone beyond conspiracy or biased sociological theories. From this study come four conclusions about Latin American Protestantism.
• It is a religious movement. No mere sociological analysis can do justice to this dramatic movement of the Spirit. And popular Protestant churches are not growing because they have applied some technique learned in a missiological school. Missionary Franz Damen suggests the key to understanding popular Protestantism is to acknowledge that it has “its own religious dynamism and logic.” José Luis Idígoras, a Jesuit missionary from Spain in Peru, observes that through the Bible teaching of Protestant pastors, “the members of the sects search above all for the religious experience of God … [for] an emotional experience that will communicate his spiritual riches to them.”
Forty Million And Counting
Church-growth bulletins were calling it one of the largest churches in the world. Some said Omar Cabrera’s church in Santa Fe, Argentina, had as many as 140,000 members. The mission organization Desarrollo Cristiano asked Cabrera how this figure was estimated. Desarrollo’s director, Randall Wittig, told CT, “He rather embarrassedly said, ‘I really don’t know. Maybe it’s the number of people on our mailing list or perhaps the total number of people at our evangelistic meetings.’ ”
When Desarrollo did its own investigation, it found that “there’s no way—even by having ten services on Sunday—to get close to the numbers they were quoting,” said Wittig.
How many evangelicals are there in Latin America? Time magazine reports that since the late 1960s, the number has increased from 15 million to at least 40 million. That is nearly 10 percent of the population. But how do researchers arrive at these numbers? And at what rate is the church growing? “There are estimates and projections,” says Wittig, “but beyond that, it’s hard to say exactly.” And churches that misrepresent their numbers are not making the task any easier.
Flawed or outmoded counting methods contribute to the inaccurate estimates. One such technique bases calculations on conversion statistics. Researchers have estimated that some 16 percent of Costa Rica’s population are evangelicals, writes Charles Spicer, Jr., president of the Overseas Council for Theological Education. But, he continues, a survey conducted by an independent polling organization found the actual percentage closer to 9 percent. The poll suggests “that we have been basing our membership calculations on ‘conversion’ statistics and ignoring the loss of converts to cults, nominalism, and syncretism.”
A number of groups take the number of adult members in a church and multiply by a factor of 3 or 4 to account for adult members’ families. But, says Patrick Johnstone of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade (WEC), “because so many younger people come to the Lord, I question the validity of that approach.”
Some denominations rely on yearly membership figures, reporting all baptized members. Even this method has its problems. Cliff Holland, executive director of In-Depth Evangelism Associates (IDEA), says that sometimes several churches in a given region will not report their numbers, giving an undercount. Another drawback, explains Desarrollo’s Wittig, is that “most of the congregations have no way of determining when people stop being members. Some people have not been to churches in three or four years but are still included on membership rolls.”
Many church leaders worry inflated membership estimates give a distorted image to outsiders, particularly to potential supporters. “Some groups inflate their estimates in order to raise money outside of Latin America,” explains Wittig. And, of course, that only diverts resources away from the groups and churches that are truly growing.
Worse, misrepresented numbers can obscure some churches’ shortcomings. In a given region, the church may have lost as many as half of its converts—but continue to report the same inflated figures. Such losses call for a re-examination of “the way the church is doing discipleship,” explains Spicer.
Patrick Johnstone’s methods produce figures he calls “a bit more conservative.” To arrive at these he looks at a number of factors, including a denomination’s “internal culture and method of counting” and a church’s age. For instance, “If it’s a young church, it will most likely consist of younger people.” Then, using figures for several previous years, he assigns a ratio to each country. He ends up with a multiplying factor of near 2 in cases of growing populations and near 1.5 with non-growing populations. He then crosschecks his figures with other evidence.
Few church-growth watchers claim to have the final word on methods. And no one claims to have the exact count. What they can say with certainty is that their methods are improving.
“What is important to emphasize is that we’re working with estimates,” cautions Roy Wingerd, director of research at the California-based Dawn Ministries. But, as David Stoll writes in Is Latin America Turning Protestant?, whatever the cautions, observers from a wide variety of perspectives “seem increasingly inclined to agree” that the Latin American church is growing in spectacular ways. Those gains, he adds, “have the potential to turn the religious landscape inside out.”
By Thomas S. Giles.
He further contrasts mainline with popular Protestantism, arguing that secularism has diluted and weakened the faith of many mainline liberal Protestants, and that “liberal faith has no energies to throw itself into the missionary task.” He criticizes the elitist theological education of Catholic priests who have an initial philosophical formation “in an environment which is obsessed by rationality.”
Other Catholics have been struck by the freedom Pentecostal churches have in responding to the “religious masses.” They have a spiritual vitality and flexibility that allows them to fill the tremendous needs of the millions of poor people going through social transitions, which often go unattended by the Catholic church.
• It is a people’s movement. It is no secret that Protestantism grows among the most destitute and marginal sectors of the population. Idígoras says that “they are popular Christians, with a rudimentary theology, endowed with heavenly visions and itinerant preachers that move through streets and squares.” One factor in Protestant growth is the ability of leadership to remain close to the people, speak their language, and develop patterns of ministry that avoid elitism. When compared to the training of priests, Idígoras notes, that of Protestant pastors “is usually less philosophical and more theological.” Their preference for simple Bible reading and commentary allows them to remain closer to the religious feeling and mind of the people. Therefore, few theologians are found among the Protestant pastors, but charismatic preachers—some on television—are common.
• It is a movement that mobilizes people for mission. Observers agree that popular Protestantism has a remarkable ability to mobilize all church members for the missionary task. “All converts are active members that have to promote the life of the sect and work for the conversion of people who are not converted yet,” says Swiss Catholic missionary to Bolivia Roger Aubry. While he says that the Protestants sometimes have a spirit more of proselytism than evangelism, he notes of his fellow Catholics, “We must confess that among us … there are few lay people actively involved in the pastoral life of their parish or their church.”
Idígoras describes popular Protestantism’s massive meetings in the open air as events “where faith is proclaimed and the multitudinous emotion is transmitted like fire.” Evangelism is far from limited to church buildings, but groups invade streets and squares, even going house by house to witness to their faith.
At the same time, some suggest that such public evangelism is not the most important means through which Protestants communicate with outsiders. Instead, rubbing shoulders with family and friends seems to be far more significant in the spread of the faith.
This sense of participation in mission corresponds also to the Protestants’ feeling of complete participation in worship and, in some cases, in congregational decision making. Sociologist Emilio Willems details one of the first studies of Pentecostals in Chile and Brazil in the book Followers of the New Faith, noting that this participatory church life was a fundamental preparation for participation in the democratic process in society. The Protestant church provides the poor with the best practical expression of the priesthood of all believers.
• It is a movement that creates community. Unsympathetic missiologists sometimes criticize popular Protestant churches for having an “escapist eschatology” that makes them insensitive to social problems. They also accuse these churches of having a “dualistic theology” that condemns the world as “completely lost,” and criticize the “ostentatious” display of healing and prophetic gifts. However, missiologists do not deny the positive social effect of popular Protestantism, especially in light of the uprooted experience of persons who have lost their previous points of reference. Says Aubry: “The atmosphere of a community of converted people which praise the Lord and find religious and human warmth in the midst of a faceless society and of almost anonymous parishes, is something essential for human life. Only within a community can the new convert persevere, [and] experience the riches of faith and its implications for life.”
Others claim popular Protestantism is an elitist movement because it advocates a more ascetic lifestyle and a more literate spirituality based on the Bible and reading. These new attitudes and habits, critics say, adopted consciously and in tension with their previous Catholic lifestyle, are the source of an arrogance through which a minority distances itself from the masses.
But Martin, noting the same phenomenon, presents the picture in a positive way. While many break cultural ties when joining the Pentecostals, for example, Martin observes that Pentecostalism renews these ties “in an atmosphere of hope and anticipation rather than of despair,” and that it gives a new lifestyle in a redeeming way. “Above all [this new faith] renews the innermost cell of the family and protects the woman from the ravages of male desertion and violence. A new faith is able to implant new disciplines, re-order priorities, counter corruption and destructive machismo, and reverse the indifferent and injurious hierarchies of the outside world. Within the enclosed haven of faith a fraternity can be instituted under firm leadership, which provides for release, for mutuality and warmth and for the practice of new roles.”
Is this not the natural outworking of the gospel? As Paul writes, “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17, NIV).
The Protestant churches in Latin America are far from perfect. The explosive growth comes with attendant problems (see “Keeping the Faithful,” p. 38). But the life of these congregations can only be explained by an infusion of spiritual power, whence also comes an instinct for relevance that is taking the region by storm.
In 1916, Brazilian Protestant Erasmo Braga wrote that the lessons from history allow us to hope “that under the impact of a simple but sincere Gospel message, such as that preached by the Apostles in ancient Rome, there will also come for Latin America an end to paganism.” Are we seeing now the fulfillment of the dreams of evangelicals at the beginning of our century?
Samuel Escobar is Thornley B. Wood Professor of Missiology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
