Latin America’s conservative Protestant churches have experienced phenomenal growth, increasing from an estimated 5,000 in 1900 to upwards of 40 million today. In this predominantly Catholic region, one-tenth of the population is now Protestant.
As they grow in numbers, the churches are becoming more interested in world missions. Some leaders say the Latin American church—given the needed tools and training—could move to the forefront of world evangelization. “I’m increasingly convinced that the task of the church in the West is to enable God’s gifted and called servants in the developing world to reach the unreached peoples [of the world],” said Luis Bush, head of the committee that coordinated a recent international missions conference in São Paulo, Brazil.
The Ibero-American Missions Congress (COMIBAM) attracted more than 2,700 delegates from 23 Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. COMIBAM represented “the first time in history that churches in the Third World, through their own initiative, have met to discuss the fulfillment of the Great Commission,” said Ralph Winter, founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission.
COMIBAM gave visibility to Latin America’s growing interest and involvement in cross-cultural missions. Consider the following:
- At least 25 mission agencies are based in Brazil. The country’s Assemblies of God and Southern Baptist denominations each have at least 200 cross-cultural missionaries in the field.
- Nazareth Church in San Salvador, which Bush pastored for seven years, supports a dozen missionaries around the world, and devotes more than half of its budget to missions.
- Interdenominational mission agencies have sprung up in recent years in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. And a Peruvian agency known as AMEN has sent missionaries to several countries, including France, England, and the Netherlands.
Still, Bush says, Latin America “lags behind Asia and Africa in the development of missionary vision.” COMIBAM was designed, in part, to turn that around.
A Process, Not An Event
Organizers refer to COMIBAM as a process rather than a one-time event. In the two years prior to the São Paulo conference, national missions congresses were held in Spain, Portugal, and almost every country of Latin America. Some of those meetings resulted in plans to launch missions agencies, research unreached people groups, or train cross-cultural workers.
More North American missionaries work in Latin America than on any other continent. But leaders say most of those missionaries have not given a high priority to producing Latin missionaries. Wade Coggins, executive director of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (EFMA), recalled that as a missionary to Colombia from 1948 to 1956, “it didn’t even occur to us … to promote missions. The missions sermons that I preached on furlough in the U.S. were put away until the next furlough.”
That situation is changing, however. Coggins served as honorary treasurer of the COMIBAM committee. And some of the more influential promoters of Latin American missions efforts are the children of U.S. missionaries.
COMIBAM itself emphasized cross-cultural outreach, focusing on local churches as missionary-sending bases. Said Bush: “Our goal is to mobilize 1,000 Latin American churches for missions.”
Conference speakers took into account the barriers to Latin churches’ sending cross-cultural missionaries. One problem relates to image. Alberto Barrientos of Costa Rica said many Latin believers are so accustomed to seeing missionaries from the United States and Europe that they automatically think of someone “from a country with great resources and a high level of culture.”
Finances pose another problem, with economies slumping badly in many Latin countries. Also contributing to that problem is the fact that most Protestants in Latin America are not aware of the practice of faith pledges and missionary support.
Accordingly, Theodore Williams of India aroused great interest with his workshop on missions within a context of poverty. He cited examples, such as the poor believers in northeastern India who support missionaries through the sale of rice and eggs. “The traditional pattern of sending a missionary with full support guaranteed is not the only divinely ordained pattern,” he concluded.
Other problems include a lack of training materials and facilities for cross-cultural missionaries and a lack of sending structures. While the problems cannot be overlooked, Bush concluded, “with enthusiasm and motivation we’re ready [to launch into world missions].”
North-South Partnerships
During COMIBAM, representatives of North American and Latin American missions agencies talked about developing partnerships as a way to help get Latin efforts off the ground.
Jack Frizen, head of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA), said he would encourage IFMA-member agencies “to share the information [from COMIBAM] and … encourage the growth of partnerships.”
The EFMA’S Coggins, like Frizen, said he favors partnerships if they are between agencies—where there is more accountability than with an individual missionary. He also emphasized that any partnership effort must allow Latin leadership to emerge to “reduce dependency.”
However, both Frizen and Coggins stressed the continued need for North American missionaries.
COMIBAM delegates were given a chance to make a public commitment to missions. Nearly everyone responded after Brazilian pastor Edison Queiroz asked that all stand who wanted “to put missions in first place in their life.”
“It seems that God has handed the missionary task to us Latin Americans,” said Armando Benner, a COMIBAM delegate who plans to work among Muslims. “… We know what it means to be oppressed, and we are from underdeveloped nations [like many of the unreached groups]. We need much prayer.”
By John Maust, in São Paulo.
