Faces of Latin American Protestantism

Faces of Latin American Protestantism
Author: José Míguez Bonino
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1997
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780802842251

Miguez reflects on Latin American Protestantism, considering the liberal, evangelical, and pentecosal facets, and then explores theologically the tasks of unity and mission still before Latin American Protestant churches.

Atando Cabos

Atando Cabos
Author: Elizabeth Conde-Frazier
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1467462780

Decolonizing theological education and restoring agency to the people Latinx Protestantism is a rapidly growing element of American Christianity. How should institutions of theological education in the United States welcome and incorporate the gifts of these populations into their work? This is an especially difficult question considering the painful history of colonization in Latin America and the Caribbean, an agenda in which theological education was long complicit. In this book, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier takes stock of the cabos sueltos—loose ends—left over from the history of Latinx Christianity, including the ways the rise of Pentecostalism disrupted existing power structures and opened up new ways for Latinx people to assert agency. Then, atando cabos—tying these loose ends together—she reflects on how a new paradigm, centered on the work of the Holy Spirit, can serve to decolonize theological education going forward, bringing about an in-breaking of the kingdom of God. Conde-Frazier illustrates how this in-breaking would bring changes in epistemology, curriculum, pedagogy, and models for financial sustainability. Atando Cabos explores each of these topics and proposes a collaborative ecology that stresses the connections between theological education and wider communities of faith and practice. Far from taking a position of insularity, Atando Cabos works from the particularities of the Latinx Protestant context outward to other communities that are wrestling with similar issues so that, by the end, it is a call for transformation—a new reformation—for the entire Christian church.

Brazilian Evangelical Missions in the Arab World

Brazilian Evangelical Missions in the Arab World
Author: Edward L. Smither
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2012-07-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1610978048

"From a mission field to a missions sender." These words capture the story of the Brazilian evangelical church, which has gone from receiving missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to becoming a movement that presently sends out more global laborers than the churches of England or Canada do. After narrating Brazil's missional shift, in this volume Smither addresses one fascinating element of the story--Brazilian evangelical efforts in the Arab world. How have Brazilians adapted culturally among Arabs, how have they approached ministry, and how have they cultivated a theology of mission in the process? Brazilian Evangelical Missions in the Arab World gives the reader insights from one emerging missions movement with an eye toward a more comprehensive view of the global church.

Journal of Latin American Theology, Volume 13, Number 1

Journal of Latin American Theology, Volume 13, Number 1
Author: Lindy Scott
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532652437

This issue of the Journal of Latin American Theology presents a selection of papers from the July 2017 conference, “Where is Protestantism in Latin America Headed? A Future-Oriented, Multidisciplinary Vision 500 Years after the Reformation.” This event was cosponsored by IAPCHE, the FTL, and CETI in Lima, Peru in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. It was a look back, with gratitude to God, for positive contributions in Latin America that can be traced to the Reformation. It was also a sobering recognition of the shortcomings of that renewal movement. Even more importantly, the scholars and practitioners involved proposed faithful steps for Protestant churches in Latin America to take in the foreseeable future. Some forty individuals gathered to explore many angles of the Reformation’s legacy in Latin America, including history, human rights, social justice, aesthetics and literature, church education, ecology and economic sustainability, and communication. The articles included here address Protestantism and Christian higher education, epistemology, autochthonous identity, Anabaptism, and development and decolonialism.

World Christianity

World Christianity
Author: Lalsangkima Pachuau
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1501842307

Christianity is vibrant and growing in the non-western “majority” world and Christianity is changing as a result. Pachuau surveys the current trending approaches to recognizing and investigating “world Christianity” and explores the salient features of the demographic changes that mark a measurable shift in the center of gravity from the northwest part of the globe to the southern continents. This shift is not just geographical. World Christianity is ultimately about the changing and diversifying character of Christianity and a renewed recognition of the dynamic universality of Christian faith itself: Christianity is a shared religion in that people of different cultures and societies make it their own while being transformed by it. Christanity is translatable and adaptable to all cultures while challenging each with its transformative power. Pachuau also charts the theological reestablishment of the missionary enterprise founded on understandings of God’s mission in the world (mission Dei), a mission of cross-cultural gospel diffusion for missionary advocates in the majority world but one of near neighbor missional engagement for the contagious Charismatic Christianity of the majority world. This book is both a descriptive study and a thoughtful analysis of world Christianity’s demographics, life, representation, and thought. The book an also gives an account of the historical emergence of World Christianity and its theological characteristics using a methodology that stresses the productive tension between the universal and particular in understanding a fundamentally adaptable Christian faith.

The Meaning of Life

The Meaning of Life
Author: John A. Mackay
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2014-03-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1620328720

Democratic principles have not taken root readily in Latin America in part because spiritual inwardness, a necessary prerequisite of democracy that is inseparable from the Bible, has been lacking. During the twentieth century Protestant workers like John Mackay (1889-1983) brought the evangelical message to that continent through lectures and writings. This collection of John Mackay's early essays presents a range of his contributions, and the ideas in the essays are grounded in his clear understanding of the nature and dignity of human beings in the light of God. The fruit of this teaching is self-confidence, courage, steadfastness, and other positive ethical attributes that accompany progress and success for individuals and peoples. The essays touch on religious, educational, literary, political, and philosophical themes in the service of Christian truth. They embody key ideas and strategic judgments related to the presentation of the Evangel, the most basic and first work of the church. The message balances spiritual and social aspects of Christianity to meet the needs of the people, and it accompanied progressive social and political changes in the region. The historical experience of Protestantism in Latin America is well worth recalling today by readers in North America and elsewhere.

Pentecostals and Charismatics in Latin America and Latino Communities

Pentecostals and Charismatics in Latin America and Latino Communities
Author: Néstor Medina
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2015-09-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1137550600

Pentecostal-charismatics in Latin America and among Latinos: communities that share profound historical, linguistic and cultural roots. This compilation brings together practitioners and academics with pentecostal-charismatic affiliations, who analyse from within the development of the movement among these diverse communities.

A Gospel for the Poor

A Gospel for the Poor
Author: David C. Kirkpatrick
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-07-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 081225094X

In 1974, the International Congress on World Evangelization met in Lausanne, Switzerland. Gathering together nearly 2,500 Protestant evangelical leaders from more than 150 countries and 135 denominations, it rivaled Vatican II in terms of its influence. But as David C. Kirkpatrick argues in A Gospel for the Poor, the Lausanne Congress was most influential because, for the first time, theologians from the Global South gained a place at the table of the world's evangelical leadership—bringing their nascent brand of social Christianity with them. Leading up to this momentous occasion, after World War II, there emerged in various parts of the world an embryonic yet discernible progressive coalition of thinkers who were embedded in global evangelical organizations and educational institutions such as the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians. Within these groups, Latin Americans had an especially strong voice, for they had honed their theology as a religious minority, having defined it against two perceived ideological excesses: Marxist-inflected Catholic liberation theology and the conservative political loyalties of the U.S. Religious Right. In this context, transnational conversations provoked the rise of progressive evangelical politics, the explosion of Christian mission and relief organizations, and the infusion of social justice into the very mission of evangelicals around the world and across a broad spectrum of denominations. Drawing upon bilingual interviews and archives and personal papers from three continents, Kirkpatrick adopts a transnational perspective to tell the story of how a Cold War generation of progressive Latin Americans, including seminal figures such as Ecuadorian René Padilla and Peruvian Samuel Escobar, developed, named, and exported their version of social Christianity to an evolving coalition of global evangelicals.