Identity And Identification:

The Latin American Protestant1 Church
Author: Paul Davies, Tutor in Theology of Mission, All Nations Christian College

Introduction The church is sent into the world with a distinct message: the gospel. It is called to announce and live out that message in the context where it is placed. The nature of the gospel, however, precludes the possibility of shouting the message from a safe distance;the message must be incarnated. This means that the messenger must live out the message and identify with the hearers. This raises the question of the tension between identity and identification, which is a problem that always faces the church in mission. The more the church emphasises its distinct identity the more it is in danger of losing its ability to identify with the world into which it issent. On the other hand, the more it identifies itself with the world, the more it faces the danger of losing its distinctiveness. Jürgen Moltmann calls this the tension between identity and relevance; José Míguez Bonino calls it the tension between the Christ reference and the universal reference. Whatever it is called it seems to sum up well the problem that has faced the Latin AmericanProtestant Church throughout its history. To Roman Catholics, the Protestant church seems foreign: an Anglo-Saxon invader, a usurper, and even a rapacious wolf stealing the Roman Catholic flock. This foreignness is accentuated by the strong Anglo-Saxon missionary heritage of the churches and has led to Latin American Protestants asking some hard questions. What does it mean to be a Latin AmericanProtestant? Does being Protestant mean to become a quasi Anglo-Saxon and lose ‘latinness’? Can there be Latin American Protestant identity, whilst maintaining identification? If so, what does it look like? How does our identity affect the mission of our churches? How does our concept of mission affect our identity? The Brazilian Presbyterian theologian and historian Rubem Alves said: The historian issomeone who recovers forgotten memories and disseminates them as a sacrament to those who have lost the memory. Indeed, what finer community sacrament is there than the memories of a common past, punctuated by the existence of pain, of sacrifice and of hope? To recover in order to disseminate. The historian is not an archaeologist of memories. The historian is a sower of visions and hopes (Alves1981: 363). This article will describe some elements of the history of Latin American Protestantism to illustrate the problem and perhaps, thereby, identify visions and hopes for the future.

Identity dominates and identification stays away The entrance of Protestantism into Latin America coincided with the revolutions that brought Latin America its freedom from colonial powers. Aristocratic elites,born in Latin America (but educated in Europe) were inspired by the philosophical ideas of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire as well as the revolutions in the United States (1776) and France (1789). They wanted to trade freely with expanding economies such as Great Britain and the Netherlands; something denied them by the laws of the Spanish Crown. They rose up against the colonialpowers to claim these rights of liberty and individual freedom.

Encounters Mission Ezine

Issue 10: February 2006 www.redcliffe.org/mission

1 of 6

The Protestant missionaries entering Latin America at the same time were influenced by the so-called ‘Second Great Awakening’ or ‘Second Evangelical Awakening’ (c. 1790-1840) and later by the 'Mid-Century Prayer Revival' (c. 1858-1880s). Boththese phenomena emphasized personal, individual conversion; the responsibility of every individual to make a personal response to the gospel. Along with the individual response, these revivals also contained a strong sense of social concern. There has been much debate over the relationship between these liberal, bourgeois revolutions, and the entrance of Protestantism. Some have denied all...