Tomorrow’s Task in Latin America

Sidney James Wells Clark, for many years intimately connected with the World Dominion Movement, has been described as “the man who saw the truth about Foreign Missions.” One of the guiding principles which he laid down was to the effect that the work being done had always to be carried out in the light of the work to be done. The unfinished task of tomorrow, he insisted, should always determine the activity of today. He defined and advocated the doctrine “that all missionary work ought to be done with ‘the Big End’ always in view, directed consciously to that end, and that whatever was done which did not assist directly to advance that end was wrongly conceived” (Roland Allen, Sidney James Wells Clark—A Vision of Foreign Missions, The World Dominion Press, London, 1937, p. 54). Time and the judgment of God upon missions in the Orient would seem to have vindicated his views.

We are entering into a new era in Latin America. Profound changes are taking place. The consciousness of these new directions invades all our missionary thinking even as it also lies near the surface of the growing self-consciousness of the Latin American evangelical church. The bearing of this upon the missionary movement is of particular concern to those of us who serve in Latin America, because in this particular area the world’s social and technological revolution is taking place amidst a population that is increasing two and a half times faster than the rest of the world.

We do not know what this will mean to us in terms of scientific advance, military and political alignments, economic conditions, and religious pressures. But in terms of evangelism, should the Lord tarry, it means that where today we are seeking to reach approximately 175 million souls, tomorrow—a mere 20 years from now—we will be dealing with 420 million! And the day after tomorrow, 550 million! We are faced with a job that is larger than ever—and more complicated. It involves a much greater number of organizations and agencies, new media and new techniques, specialized ministries and operations. Tomorrow’s task of evangelism, with all the follow-up it properly implies, must be carried out on a scale commensurate with the giant growth and radical changes that are taking place.

How, in the face of such an enormous task, are we going to fulfill the Great Commission effectively?

That is why Clark’s thoughts regarding missions are so important to us today. When we consider that of the total missionary forces in Latin America, 56 per cent belong to the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and the Interdenominational Foreign Missions Association, and that approximately 75 per cent belong to what might be called the evangelical or fundamentalist wing of the Protestant Church, we must recognize the serious responsibility that weighs upon us.

Given this preponderance of evangelical forces, the future of Latin American Protestantism may well rest in our hands. What we are and what we do now will have enormous effect upon the Church there tomorrow. That is why it is so vitally important that tomorrow’s evangelical task be conceived and executed according to wise and scriptural principles in practical reference to “the Big End.”

Tomorrow’S Task

Evangelicals agree in affirming that the goal of missions is an effective gospel witness among all peoples that shall extend the Church of Christ, through which God’s saving grace is to be made known to every creature, in every part of the earth.

This is all easily stated and serves as the basis for all public pronouncements as to mission goals and promotion. There seems to be no ignorance or confusion as to the ultimate aim. The trouble is—as many students of missions have pointed out—that most missionaries and most societies are so engrossed with the mechanics and the daily routine of the work immediately at hand—the program of their own particular group—that the long range goals are lost sight of.

This becomes specially apparent when we break down the continent into national areas and examine the work being done in each. It becomes apparent that no coordinated effort is underway by the evangelical forces resident in the territory to complete the Commission in their area. Twenty-five, fifty and in some cases seventy-five or a hundred years have gone by, and following initial waves of advance, their chief energies are now directed toward carrying on the existing work with limited possibilities of expansion. And the most obvious deficiency of evangelical forces is the lack of a concerted movement to finish the job in their own territory.

Data regarding the work carried on are generally available. The total number of missionaries, national workers, organized churches, evangelical communities in each given area is quite easily secured. But ask the Christian worker for the precise number of cities or towns that have not been adequately evangelized, and he is lost. There is abysmal ignorance of the work that remains to be done.

Costa Rica, for example, is a small country with an area of some 50,000 square kilometers and only a million inhabitants, and yet, to our knowledge, it has never been surveyed in terms of the work to be done.

What is responsible for the huge gap that exists between our professed aims and our actual activities? Why do we talk so big and do so little to accomplish it? I believe the main reason is our failure to mobilize our entire evangelical forces in constant evangelistic endeavor. We have depended too much on the foreign missionary and too much on the full-time Christian worker. By and large we have founded static churches after the pattern in the homeland. Instead of the witnessing communities founded by St. Paul (cf. 1 Thess. 1:6–8) we have brought into being passive congregations to be waited on and ministered to by national pastors trained in the same static tradition.

As a result we face a vast unfinished job which grows larger with each daily jump in population. And if we look a little more closely, it would seem that in every country there are four major areas of need.

1. There are the unreached multitudes in the big city areas. One phenomenon of Latin America’s revolutionary transformation is the amazing growth of the cities. As in the times of St. Paul, these cities are drawing immense multitudes from the surrounding towns and villages. By modern means of communication and of transportation, the cultural and intellectual life and influence of the big cities inundate the surrounding countryside. Uprooted, overwhelmed by the new social and technological environment, the people are open to the Gospel as never before.

Nothing can equal the strategic importance of these big cities. The battle for Latin America will either be won or lost there. It is there that the social and technological revolution is taking place. In place of the former peon class with machete in belt, a labor class is rising, trained in mechanical skills, and politically conscious and vocal. And in place of the small minority of landed gentry, a growing middle class of professionals—engineers, technicians, small businessmen, lawyers, teachers—is emerging. The future of Latin America lies with them.

Apart from a few exceptions, the evangelical groups tend to be weakest in the largest city centers. Take the cities in Latin America with a population of over a million inhabitants—Mexico City, Havana, Caracas, Bogota, Lima, Santiago, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, San Juan—and look for large evangelical churches. They are few and far between. In planning any advance for the future, careful thought and attention must be given to a more effective program of evangelism leading to the establishment of strong, active churches in the large city centers.

2. A second area of need is in the smaller towns and villages. Hundreds of these have never been effectively evangelized. Mission societies and national church bodies have tended to lose momentum in their evangelistic outreach and to expend their principal energies in maintaining established work.

The time has come for a new evangelistic push to occupy the towns and villages as yet unreached. Such an effort is not beyond the resources of the local forces, if carried out by a partnership of missionary personnel with the national leaders and the lay forces.

3. Thirdly, in keeping with the express injunctions of Scripture, a special effort should be made to reach the unevangelized Indian tribes still found within the national confines of almost every country. The fundamentalist missionary movement has carried out the principal efforts to reach these tribes. These agencies have succeeded as never before in focusing the attention of the churches at home upon the obligation and imperative of reaching the Indians for Christ.

But the work needs to be carried through to completion. And one of the requirements of the new missionary era is that in the approach to the Indians the national Latin American churches be encouraged to take more active part and assume greater responsibility. These tribes represent, after all, their home mission fields, and the Indian churches brought into being should be properly related to the national church.

4. While not a geographic area, there remains a fourth which is tremendously important. We refer to certain strategic classes of people.

Mention has already been made of the growing middle class of professionals which is emerging all over Latin America. Evangelical Christianity has most to offer them and most to gain from them. Professor John Gillin of the University of North Carolina tells us “they are men in search of a way of life, an ideology, and a social order that will justify and legitimize their still somewhat diffuse aspirations” (“Problems of Mestizo America: A Sociological Approach,” by John Gillin, in Civilizations, Vol. V, 1955, No. 4, p. 513). What the future will hold for them and for the evangelical movement in Latin America will depend largely on whether or not they are effectively reached for Christ. But no concerted effort has been made to reach them. Our evangelical message, worship service, literature, radio programming, are still geared almost exclusively to the less educated groups.

Of equal importance are the children and young people of Latin America. It is a truism that tends to fall on deaf ears to say that the future lies with the younger generation. But one factor in Latin America—not to be found to that degree elsewhere—makes it tremendously significant. That factor is related to the population explosion already referred to, and is brought out by one tiny statistic uncovered by the Friesen & Company Commission (a Canadian firm specializing in analyzing future hospital needs) in Costa Rica. Costa Rica, though tiny, is growing faster than any country in the world; recently it passed the million mark. Of its million inhabitants, over 50 per cent are under 17 years of age!

Tomorrow’S Strategy

In the face of the immense task that looms ahead, we ask ourselves: Are our present methods effective? Is our present program adequate? Can we carry out our Commission satisfactorily at our present pace? The answer is No. It may hurt to say so, but we may as well face it honestly. If during 100 years of missionary efforts we have failed to complete the Great Commission for five generations, what hope do we have of completing it at a time when suddenly by the hand of Providence the population is doubled in one generation? At our present rate of progress and with our present manner of operation we are falling behind and will never get the job done.

What then is the proper method?

What South American missionary has not been intrigued by the amazing development of the Pentecostal movement in the Republic of Chile? The remarkable history of a small group that was forced out of a denominational church in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1910 and which has in the intervening years so multiplied that today it numbers over 70,000 baptized members and close to half a million adherents is something to make us think! Especially when it is contrasted with the relative stagnancy of the established denomination which they left, which today can muster only some 6,000 members in the whole republic! Why should one group experience such growth and the other not—in the same field?

The search for an answer is complicated by the fact that other religions and non-Christian sects are also experiencing similar success. What is the secret of their success? Are they closer to the truth than the rest of us? We should be loathe to say so. The fact that groups with such varied emphases and contradictory doctrines are experiencing equal success would seem to prove that the message of each per se is not the key to their expansion.

What then? Superior man power? A stress on the emotional? Special methods? Organization? An examination will clearly reveal that the answer to their success does not lie in their doctrine, nor their peculiar emphases, nor their particular organization, nor their ordinances. One factor accounts especially for the growth of all these different groups. It is this: their effectiveness in mobilizing their entire membership in continuous propagation of their beliefs. The growth of each group is in direct proportion to its success in mobilizing its entire constituency in continuous evangelistic action. This was, humanly speaking, the key to the success of the apostolic church—and it is the key to success today.

We must buckle down to the task of mobilizing our entire membership in a continuous program of aggressive evangelism that is properly followed up. What does this mean? It does not necessarily imply that we must abandon the media and ministries presently employed, but it does mean a definite change in emphasis: An emphasis on the Latin American rather than the foreign missionary; an emphasis on the laity rather than the clergy; an emphasis on the local congregation as the chief unit for evangelism rather than on special organizations or individuals to do the job for them. It means concentrating on a teaching job, which is not at present being carried out, and of training the entire membership of our evangelical churches in the techniques and practice of witnessing. And it means developing a program of evangelism that will enlist the enthusiastic response of Christians and give direction and continuity to their efforts. And obviously both missionary and pastor will have to set the example.

Tomorrow’S Program

If tomorrow’s task of evangelism is so overwhelming, and if the only sound strategy which offers any hope of success is the one indicated, then it is imperative that we formulate some practical plan or program that will effect the needed reorientation in our present operations and enable us to cope with the challenge.

With full recognition of our necessary dependence upon the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit and with full awareness that this wisdom and guidance must be sought in partnership with the Latin American church, we would submit the following propositions:

1. The time has come for the evangelical forces in each separate country to launch a concerted, coordinated drive, making full provision for adequate follow-up, that will have for its expressed and immediate goal to complete the evangelization of the entire national territory. We believe it is most practical to think in terms of national rather than general or continental areas, because it immediately defines the specific area to be evangelized and thrusts the main responsibility upon the local forces. Problems of fellowship and cooperation can generally be best tackled, and the approach to the congregations to mobilize their membership best carried out, on a local level.

2. A simple program should be drawn up to enlist and employ the total membership of each congregation in a continuous effort which could bring all forces together in a church-centered campaign of prayer, training in personal evangelism and follow-up, organized visitation work, itinerant evangelism in the rural areas, and mass evangelism. Sparked and promoted by such a corps of outstanding workers as might be loaned and assigned by the cooperating bodies, effectively supported by such specialized media and ministries as literature and radio, and using all other means, such an evangelistic drive could be launched in one country after another and thus accomplish the goal of a stepped-up program that is commensurate with the demands of this growing continent.

3. The urgency of the times and the immensity of the task cry out to us to forsake our costly, overlapping, conflicting, competitive, independent ways of operation, and to determine to work together, lovingly respecting our differences of conviction and variety of gifts but ready to sacrifice our little ends for the sake of the “Big End.” Our agreement on the fundamentals of the faith makes possible cooperation in evangelism if we but set our hearts on it. If we do not, we may well consider whether we are not sinning against the Lord and against the multiplying millions in Latin America for whom he died.

Given the revolutionary changes and the exploding population in Latin America; and given the strategic position of the evangelical movement and the gigantic task of evangelism confronting us in that area, this is our one hope for meeting the challenge of tomorrow.

R. Kenneth Strachan is General Director of Latin America Mission, a service organization sponsoring literary, evangelistic and missionary activity throughout the Spanish-speaking world. It has a staff of 300 including 130 foreign missionaries. Son of the mission’s founder, Mr. Strachan holds degrees from Wheaton College, and from Dallas and Princeton seminaries.

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