Changing Tides: Latin America and World Mission Today

By Samuel Escobar

“There are few Latin American scholars who have been more involved in the churches' mission for so many years and in so many parts of the continent as the author of this book. Samuel Escobar's knowledge of its history, theological thinking, ecclesial diversity, and practical outworking is second to none. The scope of his reading is impressive. His ability to analyse and provoke further thought is outstanding. This is a genuine handbook of Latin American missiological thought and missionary engagement that covers all the different Christian traditions. I highly recommend it as an invaluable source for understanding the ways in which Christian mission has been undertaken through the years in this great Continent.” Dr J. Andrew Kirk, mission theologian, educator, author, former Director of the Centre for Missiology and World Christianity, University of Birmingham

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnum Books International
• Release date: Jul 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781914454332

Book preview

Introduction to the Second Edition

In 1991, David Bosch introduced the mission theology community to the idea of paradigm shifts. He observed that after 200 years, mission was in a process of major change. He also noted that such changes can take decades to unfold. We are still in that place of change. Originally published in 2002, Changing Tides, without exaggeration, introduced a new era in Latin America’s major contribution to global mission by one of its leading spokesmen, Samuel Escobar. Much of the change Escobar identified is still unfolding. With the first edition out of print, the editors of Regnum Books are delighted to be able to publish this updated and expanded volume to the English-speaking world. We enthusiastically invite readers to reflect and act upon the changing tides in world mission today.

Editors, Global Voices – Latin America series

Updated Preface to the First Edition

By now it is clear that Latin America will play a major role in Christian mission in the twenty-first century. Protestant churches in the region are showing great missionary drive. Half of the world's Catholics now live in Latin America, and their missionary leaders see them as a major potential resource for the future. It is, therefore, not surprising that Christian reflection in these lands has focused on key questions about the mission of the church. The region has been a kind of laboratory of experiences and thinking, and it is incumbent upon us to understand what is happening and to interpret it.

Developments like the self-generated growth of grassroots churches, the process of social change generated by religious conversion, the adoption of Protestant methods by Catholic missionaries, and the missionary impulse of Latin American exiles elsewhere in the world make it urgent for us to observe and make an effort at interpretation.

This book is part of an effort to interpret these developments from the standpoint of Christian mission. I do not know whether I have achieved my purpose of making it a coherent book with structure and connection rather than simply the collection of articles in which much of it first saw the light of day. Readers who know my work will recognize that some sections or chapters were first produced for congresses or consultations. Theological reflection in the Latin American Protestant churches has not taken place in the academic ivory tower, but in events where activists and theologians pause to look at the road traveled with a self-critical eye and proposals for doing better.

I have made use of the work of biblical scholars, historians and sociologists, and I hope I have done justice to them in the notes, where I credit them for what I have received. I am not a specialist in any of these fields, but I attempt to use their contributions to respond to questions that arise from the study of Christian mission.

I thank my colleagues in the Latin American Theological Fraternity and the American Society of Missiology (ASM) from whom I have learned so much through the years and who have prompted a major portion of these reflections. Special thanks to René Padilla, Ian Darke, William F. Dyrness and Darrell Whiteman, who encouraged me to write and publish material that I have included in this book. Pew grants administered by the Overseas Ministries Study Center allowed me to organize consultations in which some of these pages were first conceived and discussed. I thank especially Gerald H. Anderson for his friendship and encouragement through the years.

Much of this volume is a translation of Tiempo de Misión, a book that was published in Spanish jointly by Ediciones CLARA-Semilla, the Anabaptist publishing houses in Colombia and Guatemala. My special thanks to Juan Francisco Martinez, for his fraternal encouragement and his patience as an editor of the Spanish version. Part of chapter 6 was published as an article in Missiology, and part of chapter 10 appeared as a chapter in the book Emerging Voices in Global Christian Theology, edited by William F. Dyrness.

Without the encouragement of Bill Burrows at Orbis Books, the first edition of Changing Tides would not have been a reality. During the writing of that edition, I carried on a conversation with Phillip Berryman about many of the issues I tackle in these pages, and I thank him for being a traduttore and not a traditore. ¡Muchas gracias! to Bill and Phil.

May God use these reflections to encourage and help Christians who have set out in obedience to the missionary call of Jesus Christ.

Samuel Escobar

1. Christian Mission Today

It was in Manila in the Philippines, the same year that the Berlin Wall fell, when we realized how much and how fast the world was changing. Several thousand of us had gathered as Christians in one of those huge multicultural, multiracial congresses where you meet many new friends but where it is hard to find your old ones. Those of us from the Third World were very curious to find out about the Russians and Eastern Europeans. Among them was a Russian engineer who had become an evangelical preacher. He was going around looking for an African physician whom he had known twenty years previously in Moscow. With a scholarship to Patrice Lumumba University (now known as the People’s Friendship University of Russia), that African student had spent months telling the Russian the story of Jesus and challenging him to become his disciple. Twenty years later, the Russian wanted to thank the Third World missionary who had shared the gospel with him. The high point of the meeting was a spectacular and moving embrace.

The advance of the gospel today, as in the past, owes a great deal to encounters like this, in which some ordinary human beings, out of need or calling, go beyond the boundaries of their own world and venture into the world of the other. For almost twenty centuries, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been crossing all types of borders, going from one country to another, from one culture to another, from one social class to another. Today Jesus Christ is invoked, and his Word is read, in almost all languages and dialects. The message of Jesus has attained a universality greater than that of any other person in history.

Historians, anthropologists and sociologists study migrations of communities or peoples, movements of cultural penetration and changes of religious affiliation. What they find hard to explain is the drive that moves believers to share their faith, especially when they gain nothing and sometimes have to bear persecution. We Christians believe that in this constant crossing of borders, the Holy Spirit is pressing the church to fulfill the mission for which God formed it; achieving the aim of sharing the redeeming love, revealed and carried out by Jesus Christ. In a broad sense, the term mission has to do with the presence and testimony of the church in a society; how the church is a community whose members incarnate one type of life according to the example of Jesus Christ, the worship that the community renders publicly to God, the service to human needs undertaken by the community, and the prophetic function of challenging the forces of evil that destroy persons and societies.

The more specific concept of mission that serves as our starting point in this book has to do more precisely with this drive of the Christian church to carry the message of Jesus Christ to the four winds. When the church becomes fully aware that it has been formed and sent into the world with a purpose, it feels impelled to fulfill its mission. The very word mission comes from the Latin root mittere, which means to send. In recent times, there has been a rediscovery of the meaning of presence and service in the world, which must characterize the Christian mission, and also a rediscovery of the particular meaning of the proclamation, which is an absolutely essential component of mission. The historian and theologian Justo González has stated it eloquently and clearly:

The history of the Church is the history of its Mission. This is because the Church is its mission. The church is not born when the Lord calls some fishermen, but when he calls them to make them fishers of men (Mt. 4: 18-22; Lk. 5:1-11); not when a group of Christians shuts itself up in a chamber for fear of the Jews, but when Jesus Christ tells these Christians as the Father has sent me, so I send you (Jn. 20:19-23); not when the disciples have the mystical experience of seeing tongues of fire over their heads, but when this experience is translated into a witness that overcomes all language barriers (Acts 2:1-11).¹

Century after century, the Holy Spirit causes women and men to come forth from the people of God, seized with a passion for evangelization, to set out and cross all kinds of borders and to carry the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the gospel of salvation, to other human beings who do not yet know him. The church that carries out its mission is always a pilgrim community, a people on the way, sent out under obedience to the four winds.

The witness of the evangelist John tells us that at a high point of his ministry, Jesus said, And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.² John observes that with these words Jesus was referring to his death. Thus, from the cross on which he was exposed to the gaze of all like a criminal, Jesus was going to be like a magnet attracting all human beings. Later, this risen Jesus, to whom all authority in heaven and on earth has been given, tells the apostles, i.e. those whom he has sent, that he wants to have disciples in all the nations of the earth. Hence he sends them with a full agenda: to announce, teach, and baptize and he promises that he will be with them continually through the Holy Spirit.³

The geographical borders that the apostles will have to cross on the initial mission are explicit in the missionary mandate from the Master. They are concentric circles with a universal scope: Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.⁴ By the second missionary generation, represented by the Apostle Paul, the borders also take on a specific cultural dimension. Having preached throughout the Eastern region of the empire from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum,⁵ Paul proposes to go to the ends of the earth, to faraway Spain where the continent ends. Likewise, the apostle affirms the universality of his call in terms of the multiple cultures of his world whose borders he crosses: he is in debt to the cultured and the uncultured, to the learned and the unschooled, to Jews and Gentiles.⁶

The reason for this constant movement is that the Christian faith is, by its very nature, missionary. Paul says that faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the Word of Christ.⁷ The truth that saves and gives meaning to life is not a truth that every human being brings into the world like a spark that may be fanned into a flame by religious practice or philosophical knowledge. The truth that saves is a Word that another human being, a witness, transmits to us. It is not something discovered by introspection but is a witness that is received. Whoever attains salvation upon receiving the testimony is obligated to incarnate this work and to reflect the light received by becoming light.

The new life is a Word that enlightens. The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?⁸ sang the Israelites and Jesus said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.⁹ Thus, as God is light and Jesus is the light of the world, the disciples are to give light. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus demands, You are the light of the world¹⁰ which has to do with to the practice of the truth, with a life of good works that bring others to glorify God. In Paul's words, this proclamation wells up out of an immense sense of gratitude: I am a debtor to all.¹¹ This leads him to exclaim, Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel!.¹²

The history of Christian mission is not only the story of the vicissitudes along the way while crossing geographical borders, but also the story of venturing to cross from one culture into another, struggling against the ethnocentrism and racism innate in the human heart. It is the story of the ongoing and surprising discovery of the other. Jews discover Gentiles beyond Jerusalem; well-educated Greeks discover the barbarians beyond the border of the Roman empire; Spaniards discover the Moors beyond the border of medieval Christendom; Europeans discover Indians and Asians across the ocean. At its best moments, Christian mission starts out from this new experience of a new people in which borders vanish because there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.¹³ Those who belong to this people can genuinely say that From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.¹⁴

The incarnation of the Word, which grounds God’s saving work, tells us that the Word is translated into a visible reality that our eyes can see.¹⁵ The message of this incarnate Word can be translated into all human languages. Indeed, the basic documents, namely the Gospels, are already a translation because we do not have them in the Aramaic, which Jesus spoke, but in the everyday Greek, which was more widely spoken in the first century. This translatability of the gospel shows that it is a message that can reach maximum universality: his message is intended to be translated and shared.

Thus, the power of the gospel that presses the church toward fulfilling its mission also engages the people of God in a constant contextualization process; the text moves from context to context. Today, in the twenty-first century, we are more than ever aware that missionaries are vessels of clay, bearers of the glory of the gospel, that they themselves are weak and likely to break, as Paul said very well: but we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.¹⁶ When this text is taken in its context in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, the apostle's specific intention becomes clear as he describes the missionary task as an enterprise carried out by persons who are fragile and weak and subject to contingencies like perils, suffering and persecution. The memory of these lines from Paul removes any imperial pretension and reaffirms the model of mission in the style of Jesus Christ, a style completely different from that practiced by the Constantinian church, allied to oppressors and conquerors, who used mission to subject other human beings to human domination.

New Frontiers

We now find ourselves in a world in which the gospel has crossed almost all geographical borders and the Church is present in the most remote corners of the earth. From one angle, it can be said that transportation and communication technology have made the planet a global village. An email carries a news report from Moscow to Medellin in a few seconds, and any Japanese tourist covers in eight hours the journey from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean that took Christopher Columbus six weeks in 1492. Computers enable a Guatemalan Bishop to know in seconds whether the Holy Office in the Vatican approves of a certain liberation theologian or not. Over an invisible network of waves in outer space, a new and nervous culture with its own language of satellites, computers, statistics, deadly weapons and viruses is rapidly transforming the world.

From another angle, however, it can be said that the cultural and social gap separating one race from another within a single society may have increased to the point that, in the same city, some groups separated by only a few yards do not communicate with one another. That is what happens between Blacks, Hispanics, and Jews in New York City, or between Serbs and Croats in the Balkan Peninsula. Although some churches send missionaries from New York or Los Angeles to the other side of the world, sometimes their members are unable to pray or be in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in Christ who are of another race, just a few blocks away.

Moreover, migrations have brought into the heart of Europe and the United States refugees from around the world who are now posing the challenge of a new cultural and religious pluralism unfamiliar to the wealthy countries. At the same time, the collapse of Marxism in Eastern Europe has exposed the age-old barriers of racial prejudice that are reaching proportions of a destructive tribalism that had only been repressed, not destroyed, by the ideology of dialectical materialism. In such a world, what new borders must Christian missionaries cross today?

A New Fact in the New Century

At this point in the twenty-first century, a Christian observer stands facing something completely new in the history of Christianity. The numerical balance of forces of the Christian presence in the world has been radically altered. In contrast with the early twentieth century, when the large churches and the missionary strength were in Europe and North America, today the practice of Christian faith is declining rapidly in Europe while the churches of Africa and Latin America are growing vigorously. The numerical growth of Christian churches in Africa is the most dramatic case. It is estimated that in 1900 there were nine million Christians in Africa, whereas today there are over 360 million.¹⁷

However, statistics do not tell the whole story. Today it is acknowledged that the missionary zeal has shifted to the south. Even though the African and Latin American churches are poor and are facing dramatic challenges as a result of the social and economic crises in their regions, they are sending missionaries to other parts of the world. It is also startling to see how certain young Asian churches, such as those in Korea, have burst into the missionary world with unusual strength. The European and North American churches remain rich and enjoy special privileges in their societies, but they seem to be incapable of resisting the eroding impact of modernity, secularism and pluralism. Their members show little or no interest in sharing their faith. They have become resigned to gradually disappearing, closing places of worship and giving up all efforts to shape the societies of which they form a part.

Specialists in missionary research have been noting and analyzing the entry onto the scene of the churches of the south. Noteworthy among them are some, who after serving as missionaries, have then gone on to reflect on mission, such as the Catholic, Walbert Bühlmann, and the Protestants, Andrew Walls and Lesslie Newbigin. Bühlmann describes this new process as the emergence of the Third Church. Writing in 1986, he said,

I have maintained that the Third Church is approaching, church of the Third World, but also church of the third millennium. Roughly speaking we can say that the first Christian millennium, with the first eight councils all held in the East, stood mainly under the leadership of the First Church, the Eastern church; the second millennium stood under the leadership of the Second Church, the Western Church, which shaped the Middle Ages and, from the time of the discovery of the New World, undertook all missionary initiatives. Now the coming third millennium will evidently stand under the leadership of the Third Church, the Southern church. I am convinced that the most important drives and inspirations for the whole church in the future will come from the Third Church.¹⁸

This factor can no longer be ignored in any reflection on the future of Christian mission. With the meeting of the International Missionary Council in 1928,¹⁹ European Protestants became aware that the old Europe was losing its spiritual fiber and could no longer be regarded as the Christian civilization that it had always claimed to be. In Catholic circles in 1943, two French priests, Henri Godin and Yves Daniel, sounded the cry of alarm with their work France: Pays de Mission?, in which they recognized that vast sectors of the French population, particularly workers and students, were ignorant of the Christian faith or had abandoned it.²⁰ This realization has only grown and become more acute. The missiologist, Lesslie Newbigin, was on very good grounds when he said that so-called Western Christian culture is the one most resistant to the gospel, while other cultures show themselves to be much more receptive.²¹ Bühlmann explains the shift of the strength of the churches to the South, and points to one cause that also suggests its missionary potential:

The West is becoming more and more an aging community and church.²² But in the Third World as a whole, 42 percent of the population is under 15 years of age.²³ The church there is a church of youth, hope, the future. These peoples are also still very poor. The church there has the opportunity of becoming the church of the poor and for the poor, not merely on paper but in deed and in truth.²⁴

He is not exaggerating; a sustained look is enough to show the validity of what he says. For example, the churches that have grown most in Latin America are grassroots churches of the Pentecostal type. It is at this grassroots level where growth has been greatest. The older forms of Protestantism helped create a middle class, but many of them are declining in both North America and Latin America. In the United States, in my own Baptist denomination, there are places where the average age of members is 60 or over and there are no children or young people. These churches will soon be closing. Yet in this same denomination, the Hispanic, Black, Vietnamese and Chinese churches are growing. These ethnic minority churches are generally poorer than the Anglo-Saxon or European-descended majority but these churches have a style different from that of the white churches and hence it is sometimes difficult for the congregation to get along within the denomination because of issues of style, worldview, liturgy, schedules, food and the like.

It is not easy for missionary strategists, theological educators and candidates for missionary work to understand and take on the consequences of this new balance of Christian forces in the world. It used to be said that Christianity was a Western religion but that is no longer the case today. If we could see a picture of all the faces of Christians in the world today, most of them would not be white, but rather black, yellow, bronze, or a whole range of colors, where whites are in a minority. What color is God's skin? goes a song and, in answering it, we turn not to an ideal but to a fact.

Andrew Walls in particular draws attention to the fact that the major theological issues and missiological debates in the twenty-first century are not going to be those posed by European and North American universities and seminaries. Rather, they are going to arise out of the life of the churches that are embarking on missions along the new frontiers. The Eurocentric worldview, which is so influential in the way history is written or the theological agenda is defined, will have to change. We must, therefore, realize that the majority of Christianity today is not that of the theology of the pastoral textbooks taught in theological seminaries. Today's Christianity is different from the mindset of the Protestant missionaries who came to Latin America early in the twentieth century. The Christianity of the new century will be of another color and another type.

Only within the framework of this new world situation of Christianity can we understand what has happened in Latin America during the twentieth century. Anyone posing the question of the future of Christian mission must comprehend this reality, because the followers of Christ in Latin America will play a very important role in that mission. Understanding the current missionary reality has been possible thanks to the dedicated work of missionaries and scholars who have combined activism with reflection. The systematic study of Christian mission is an interdisciplinary approach that we call missiology. This book is written from an evangelical viewpoint, and hence we devote a chapter to sketching out the missiological task and identifying the prevailing missiological approaches in the evangelical world, as it is this sector of Protestantism that continues to produce most missionary activity.

¹Justo L. González, Historia de las Misiones (Buenos Aires: La Aurora, 1970: 23).

²John 12:32.

³Matthew 28:18-20.

⁴Acts 1:8.

⁵Romans 15:19.

⁶Romans 1:13-15. For this translation, biblical quotations are primarily from the New Revised Standard Version; Escobar's original text primarily used the Nueva Versión Internacional.

⁷Romans 10:17.

⁸Psalms 27:1.

⁹John 8:12.

¹⁰John 8:12.

¹¹Romans 1:14.

¹²1 Corinthians 9:16.

¹³Galatians 3:28.

¹⁴2 Corinthians 5:16.

¹⁵And the Word became flesh and lived among us – John 1:14.

¹⁶2 Corinthians 4:7.

¹⁷Each year a statistical table on the state of Christianity is published in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.

¹⁸Walbert Bühlmann, O.F.M. Cap., The Church of the Future: A model for the year 2001 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), pp. 5-6.

¹⁹The International Missionary Council was a Protestant body that brought together the missionary boards of Europe and North America, and which sought to coordinate missionary action, as well as information exchange and research on Christian mission.

²⁰Timothy Yates, Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 136.

²¹Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (Geneva: WCC, 1986).

²²Editor’s Note: 19.1% of the population in the More Developed countries was age 65 or older in 2020, in comparison with 7.4% in the same category on the Less Developed nations, according to data from the United Nations (https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.19.3.204).

²³Editor’s Note: In 2019, 39% of the population of the Least Developed countries was under 15 years of age according to data from the United Nations (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.0014.TO.ZS).

²⁴Bühlmann, The Church of the Future, p. 5. Ibid.

2. Mission Today: Practice and Reflection

Today, there are 5,500 agencies devoted to sending out Christian missionaries and over 425,000 people working outside their countries of origin as Christian missionaries in the world.¹ This total may be grouped into three main sectors: Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. Within the Protestant sector the most vigorous missionary force is that of the so-called evangelical churches, which are theologically conservative, pietistic in spirituality and zealous about evangelization. This sector includes the missionary strength of the Pentecostal churches. Protestants in the so-called historic churches had strong missionary activity in the first half of the twentieth century but it dropped off for various reasons. After World War II, missionary activity from the United States intensified, especially from independent missions and parachurch entities. Today, evangelicals and Pentecostals constitute the largest missionary force within Protestantism and the missions coming from the Majority World² are also from churches of this kind.

What has been said thus far has to do with what we may call official mission in the sense that it is organized deliberately by people who are fully devoted to such activity. However, the church’s missionary activity is much greater because there are millions of Christians who, wherever they are, strive spontaneously not only to live as disciples of Christ but also to transmit their faith to others. When I visited Australia in 1988, my hosts in the Church Missionary Society, a mission of Anglican volunteers, told me that they had a group studying the possibility of starting a mission to serve Spanish-speaking immigrants. Almost at the end of my tour, I had a chance near Sydney to meet with a group of Spanish-speaking believers who had emigrated to Australia. There were around fifty people, including Argentinians, Chileans, Nicaraguans, Mexicans and Peruvians. Some had emigrated for political reasons and others were seeking a better economic future. They were working as professional people, merchants and skilled craftsman but none were pastors or missionaries. Yet they had already founded nine Spanish-speaking churches in Southwest Australia! Within the new wave of Latin American, Asian and African immigrants in the United States and in some European countries, there are thousands of people with evangelical convictions who are active church members, evangelizing and forming disciples. Thus, a process of church revitalization is plainly underway, and the churches benefit from this new