The Gospel after Christendom

New Voices, New Cultures, New Expressions

Bolger, Ryan K.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441238719
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ed etica sistematica

Emerging and missional church movements are an increasingly global phenomenon; they exist as holistic communities that defy dualistic Western forms of church. Until now, many of the voices from these movements have gone unheard. In this volume, Ryan Bolger assembles some of the most innovative church leaders from around the world to share their candid insider stories about how God is transforming their communities in an entirely new era for the church. Bolger's new book continues the themes that he and Eddie Gibbs established formally in their critically acclaimed Emerging Churches and situates new church movements within this rubric. It explores what's happening now in innovative church movements in continental Europe, Asia, and Latin American and in African American hip-hop cultures. Featuring an international cast of contributors, the book explores the changes occurring both in emerging cultures and in emerging and missional churches across the globe today.

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Iglesias Emergentes in Latin America

Osías Segura-Guzmán

When we think of a vibrant church in Latin America, the image of a Pentecostal or neo-Pentecostal congregation may come to mind. However, the term “Pentecostal” would probably not be used to describe most emergent churches.[1] Emergent congregations in Latin America are very few in number. They are usually small congregations working under the radar, and they are often stigmatized and overshadowed by larger churches. Finding information about the iglesia emergente (emergent church) in Latin America was an enormous challenge because the movement is still very young and small.

When I began exploring the existence of the iglesia emergente in Latin America, I contacted my younger Facebook friends throughout Latin America, various vagabond theologians, and some of my former seminary students in Costa Rica. Some of them shared their opinions on the movement and some referred me to ministries they knew. Thus to collect data and references I started a Facebook page called “Iglesias Emergentes en America Latina.” The challenge, however, is that not all of those who called themselves emergente truly fit the criteria of emerging churches, while some who do seem to be part of this group do not call themselves emergente. Some perceived their churches as fragile, and maybe not even as churches, and for fear of criticism they resisted providing data for this research. I cannot say that I found as much information as I wanted, but I was able to explore some of what this diverse but very small movement has to offer.

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“Emerging church” is a difficult category concept. It is a recognised term for churches that are reshaping themselves for a postmodern world. But in another sense, hopefully, aren’t all churches emerging, in that we are changing and evolving for a new context? If a church self-identifies as emerging I refer to it as such and encourage it to ensure that the reality matches up to the rhetoric. Darren Cronshaw

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It is important to state at the outset that I am a Latin American who has spent most of my time studying the church in this region. Nevertheless, no matter how long I will spend studying the church in Latin America, I believe I will never be able to fully explain it. Perhaps I can only describe it. The church in Latin America is so diverse and mutates so fast that when one thinks one can typologize it, one realizes that it has changed again. Therefore, this chapter is an exploratory work filled with descriptions. I do not know if I am portraying the right image of emerging churches in Latin America, but the approximation in this chapter satisfies me. I seek to answer a series of questions in order to begin to understand iglesias emergentes.

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The emerging church phenomenon’s strength lies at the grassroots level at which it operates. Its theory arises from its praxis—and is consequently more diverse and less coherent.

Eddie Gibbs (CM, 36)

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A challenge of mapping small organic-style churches is that they are not as measurable and are more sensitive to the potentially intrusive nature of surveys and research. Darren Cronshaw

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First, I will begin by exploring the concern of whether iglesias emergentes are another “packaged” ecclesiology coming from the North. Second, I will briefly discuss in what ways Latin America is and is not a postmodern society. Third, I will place iglesias emergentes within the context of other postmodern churches in Latin America. Finally, I will end this chapter by describing three case studies that illustrate a spectrum of iglesias emergentes in Latin America.

Culture

Christianity in Latin America

Colonial and neocolonial forces have exploited this diverse and beautiful region for many centuries. Let us remember that Christianity came to Latin America along with the conquistadors’ enterprise. Among these conquistadors were missionaries who were often unaware of the oppression in which they participated simply by their association with the structure of domination in colonialism. Those missionaries belonged mostly to the two main branches of Christianity, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant churches, which came to this region three hundred years apart. First, in the 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church arrived in what is today known as Latin America as the ideological force of the Spanish conquistadors. Then, in the 1800s, the Protestant and evangelical churches came to Latin America as the ideological force of British and United States capitalism.

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The Philippines is also predominantly influenced by the Roman Catholic Church because of the Spanish influence, which lasted for almost four hundred years. The Spanish conquistadors came to the Philippines at almost the same time. Eileen Suico

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Yes, there are similarities between the Catholicism in Asia and Latin America. However, Latin American countries became republics and embraced the European enlightenment in the early nineteenth century. This makes this region “Western,” although it is part of the two-thirds world. Latin America experienced all three: premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity. Osías Segura-Guzmán

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While recognizing that Latin America suffered ecclesiological colonialism, we also need to accept the reality that Latin Americans have not been passive recipients. That the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant, evangelical, Pentecostal, and neo-Pentecostal churches in Latin America look different from the rest of the world is a sign of innovation, demonstrating contextualization, although perhaps at times also religious syncretism. We have locally adopted and innovated all of the “products” we received from global empires. What was once an outside idea becomes our idea. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between innovation and the contextualization of ecclesiologies, and Latin American churches need to work harder on the latter task.

Is Latin America a Postmodern Society?

In Latin America, one can find premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews coexisting in the same space. Social evolutionists may not agree with this statement because they would argue that in order for postmodern expressions of religion in Latin America to exist, modernity in its full expression must first have flourished in the region. In Latin America, however, the progression through these categories has not been as linear as it perhaps was in the North Atlantic societies. For example, in many parts of Latin America folk-Catholic pilgrimages remain a vibrant part of society, with people from all generations participating together in them. This type of ritual could be classified as a premodern expression of faith. At the same time, within many evangelical churches there is still a strong emphasis on orthodoxy and rational expressions of faith, as evidenced by the sermon occupying at least half of most worship services. Many of these churches continue to operate primarily from within a modern worldview, emphasizing a rigid set of beliefs and practices. As we will see in the case studies below, there is also evidence of postmodern approaches to the practice of the Christian faith. Therefore, within Christianity in Latin America, we see this combination of premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews.

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Postmodernity presents a missional challenge to the Protestant churches and the evangelical movements that arose in Europe and North America during the era of modernity. Some of these movements go back to the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe, while others are the product of nineteenth-century Revivalism in North America.

Eddie Gibbs (CM, 20–21)

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While it is recognizably oversimplistic, for the purposes of argument, we may label as premodern the Roman Catholic Church presence in most parts of the mestizo population, with its folk-Catholic expressions. Modern churches may be characterized as evangelical (Protestant), Pentecostal, and charismatic congregations. More recently, new postmodern congregations focused on reaching out to young, well-educated populations are beginning to take root.

These postmodern minorities of middle-class young professionals live, paradoxically, in contexts of poverty, violence, and exploitation. They have access to higher education, learn English as a second language, and obtain better-paying jobs than previous generations. Some of these jobs are the result of outsourcing from economic empires (e.g., call centers) and tourism services, among others in the service sector, where they can receive good salaries that may distinguish them as middle or upper-middle class.[2] They may live in gated neighborhoods, and what they expect of a church is very different from what those in the lower class may desire. This group and the churches beginning to develop to serve them represent a postmodern stream within Latin America.

Experiments

Are There Postmodern Churches in Latin America?

New religious movements within Latin American Christianity continue to bloom, among them many types of new and small congregations trying to reach people in postmodern contexts. Examples of such expressions include satellite churches, internet churches, house churches, theater churches, churches without walls, and some megachurches that are trying to move away from the seeker-sensitive model and prosperity theology. While some of these models, judged from a missiological perspective, are short-term, laughable, and actually painful to see, others may provide helpful ecclesiological options.

The leaders of these postmodern congregations in Latin America, who are generally under thirty-five years of age, were part of traditional denominations and/or may have had some antagonism within megachurches. They may have participated in the first attempts to bring the creative use of arts and music into worship and to indigenize Christian music. Abusive and monolithic leadership structures, weak community building, and doctrinal legalism disappointed them, pushing them to develop something different and nontraditional.

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The monolithic and weak community of the established church in Latin America could describe most of the Anglican Church in the UK, with its top-down directive structure and its, for the most part, nominal attendees. It was amid this environment that John Wimber visited St. Thomas’ Church, and soon a focus on small groups (which had for some time been popular in UK churches) was combined with the emphas...