FUTURE PERSPECTIVES FOR LATIN AMERICAN PENTECOSTALISM

Abstract

The context As the 21st century draws near, Latin America is leaving behind a long period of authoritarian governments and military dictatorships inspired by the ideology of National Security. Beside the peculiar situation of Cuba, formal democracies are more or less firmly established in all Latin American countries. In nations long divided by bloody civil confrontations, hopeful peace processes are now taking place. Some Latin American countries are exhibiting successful macro-economical results. To what extent this new scenario means good news for the majorities of the Latin American people is not easy to say. The other side of the coin is the increasingly deep gap between the many poor and the few rich. While in most Latin American cities the few rich enjoy as many of the benefits of modernity as the most affluent people of the North, misery continues to be the daily bread of the many poor. Traditional bonds of fraternity and solidarity are undermined by the individualistic thrust of the market economy, and problems, both new or old, take their toll of the most vulnerable: drug addiction and trafficking, street children, diseases spread by sexual promiscuity, increasingly violent delinquency, etc. Although the crisis of viability of the utopian dreams which had fired great expectations of social transformation, and the extremely formal and institutional character of the new democracies, has had a paralysing effect upon the traditional popular movements, new ways of social participation are being devised in order to fight against specific forms of exclusion, discrimination or injustice: ethnic, sexual, religious, etc. Though still involving, at best, a minority, these movements bring hope of new ways of empowering people to exercise full citizenship. This rather impressionistic picture of Latin America as it faces the end of the 20th century provides the background for my reflections on the future of mission in the region. I have been asked to focus on the way Pentecostalism is likely to develop in this context, as well as on the opportunities and difficulties for cooperation between this stream of Christianity and the so-called mainline churches. To do that, I have to start with some brief references to the past and present of Latin American Pentecostalism. An Overview on Latin American Pentecostalism A century after the arrival of James Thomson, the first Protestant missionary in Chile, the 1920 National Census showed that Protestants numbered only 54,000 (1.4 percent of the total population), of whom 17,000 were foreigners, 10,000 of them Lutherans, who had become naturalised Chileans.(1) Seventy two years later, the 1992 National Census showed that Evangelicals and Protestants together had reached 13.2 percent of the population aged 14 years and above. All observers agree that the higher rate of Protestant growth in the latter period has to be seen as the result of the dynamic expansion of Chilean Pentecostalism, established as an independent and indigenous church at the beginning of the second decade of this century. What has happened in Chile is not unique; it was an early manifestation of a phenomenon which has become characteristic of the Latin American religious landscape. Born either from local revivals within Protestant churches or from the work of foreign Pentecostal missionary individuals or agencies, Pentecostal churches are now throughout the continent the fastest growing religious movement. I will not attempt to measure such a growth, because the figures given by the literature for the different countries are not always reliable as they are taken from a variety of sources. It is important to mention, however, that the trends of growth vary from one country to another and that some often quoted predictions about the future growth are, in my view, overstated.(2) Whatever their origin, most Latin American Pentecostal churches are nowadays independent or indigenous in their leadership, ministry and finances. …