The word "church" can be studied and read from different standpoints and in this paper we are going to emphasize what it means to be church in Latin America today and in particular to be a Presbyterian and Reformed church. Other groups have submitted studies on the word "church" from the Greek meaning and I therefore feel it is not necessary to dwell on that aspect here. For the purposes of this paper we can take a definition of church that contains the following ideas: it is a free gathering of a community of people, with no social or sexual discrimination, within a particular situation, in order to preach the Word and share the sacraments. Given that definition, we are looking at various aspects: "the word and the sacraments" from the Calvinist point of view, and the idea of a free gathering to worship God and serve one's neighbour as put forward by Marquínez Argote.

The word "church" has been very over-worked in the religious language of Latin America. To many people, "church" means a building to be found in a particular place. To others, the church is an institution such as the Catholic Church, or a denominational church-Baptist, Presbyterian, etc. The use of the word to mean "denomination" is very common today in Latin America. The concept of church as a community meeting to worship God and serve one's neighbour would be more appropriate for the Presbyterian churches, and we would also be following Boff's view.

In this paper, we intend to offer two analytical perspectives on our context and a proposal for church action for Latin America. The first perspective is secular and will cover some aspects of our historical and economic context. The second perspective studies some of the main elements of Protestant ecclesiology in Latin America. Finally, we shall put forward some pathways (not models) to Christian commitment to being a Presbyterian church in Latin America today.

Latin American social context

When we talk about the social context, we include most of the aspects related to history, politics, economics and justice. Given the constraints of space and time, we shall take up the topic only from the historical and economic standpoints.

History

Latin America has more than 500 years of dependency and exploitation behind it: the only thing that changed was the name or country of the exploiters as the method of exploitation was more finely tuned. The poor have remained a constant feature-male, female, black, Indian or sick- with one addition: their situation is getting worse.

We should like to highlight Leonardo Boff's description of Latin America as "Europe's unwanted daughter". It was conceived under the forces and ideas of modernity, where the centre used power, knowledge and the heritage of Christianity to impose an ideology, a language and a religion. The topic of our historical past is fundamental to an understanding of our current reality and the way we can be church today. This topic has been well documented by historians, economists, and theologians of both sexes, and in this paper we are only going to make a few references to help us to understand the reality of everyday life.

Luis N. Rivera Pagán wrote a book entitled Evangelización y Violencia: La Conquista de América Latina [Evangelization and Violence: The Conquest of Latin America] in which he documents in detail the Christianization and enslavement of our continent. In chapter seven he quotes Fray Tomás Ortiz who, when talking about the Latin Americans of that time, our ancestors, says that "they are like donkeys... they are bestial in their vices... they are not capable of learning doctrine... they are treacherous, cruel and vengeful." These phrases reveal the understanding that the Europeans shared of the original inhabitants and, by contrast, of their own superiority, an understanding that obliged the conquered to accept the situation. The Europeans were good, wise and saintly.

In the eighth chapter of the same book, Rivera Pagán analyses the cultural and religious problem caused by the invasion of European ideology. The customs and beliefs of the original inhabitants were dismissed as demon-worship. The Europeans were regarded-and saw to it that they were regarded-as gods, maintaining that idea as a strategy for domination.

In the ninth chapter, Rivera Pagán describes the enormous magnitude of the horror imposed wherein millions of the original inhabitants died from epidemic diseases, from the loss of their families and their lands, and from forced labour.

To go further into the topic of genocide we have to consider the work of Enrique Dussel who researched the letters of the bishops to support his findings. He says that it is possible that genocide caused the deaths of some 50 million of the original inhabitants between 1532 and 1608.

Returning to Rivera Pagán, in the tenth chapter he presents the compulsory introduction of blacks into Latin America. This was part of the global economic market, and blacks were completely uprooted from their own world, culture, family and language to make it easier for them to be enslaved and dehumanized. Rivera Pagán offers three interesting ideas on this subject: (a) slavery and blackness became almost synonymous; (b) slavery was justified ideologically; (c) slavery was a successful, lucrative trade.

The lack of understanding of our cultural, racial, religious and social roots produced Latin American men and women who sometimes try to identify with Europe in terms of culture, language, ideology or racial ascendancy, despising and demonizing what is indigenous or black. If we are to be the Presbyterian church in Latin America today it is essential to remember the history, not in a spirit of vengeance, but as a means of identifying with our past.

The context of poverty

Like all social questions, the economic aspect of Latin America is complex. At present, we have some countries that achieved a kind of economic stability by controlling inflation and public spending, using as an instrument the neoliberal system imposed by the banks and the countries with monetary capacity that control the loans for the development of the poor countries. Using extremely inhuman methods, public services were privatized, with the result that the lives of the poor are made increasingly difficult. States are struggling to present appropriate growth rates and to meet their external debt payments. Almost all Latin American countries manage in this fashion to present a kind of constant positive growth that may be more theoretical than real.

We discover that the real picture is staggering. The rich strata of society continue to receive the benefits of economic adjustment and the poor get ever less. The number of poor and unemployed continues to rise. In a report by the organization Brot für die Welt [Bread for the World] broadcast on CNN on 19 October 1996, it was said that in absolute figures the number of poor in Latin America increased from 42 million in 1985 to 60 million in 1995.

It will come as no surprise to learn that most Latin American theologians of either sex, basing themselves on the three principles "see", "judge" and "act", begin their books with a presentation of the plight of the poor.

We do not scorn the efforts of some Christian groups to evangelize the social strata with the greatest economic power. Some of those groups are being really successful. However, being the Presbyterian church in Latin America today involves evangelization of (giving the good news to) millions of human beings that live in dire poverty and other millions that survive without having access to the conditions necessary for a normal life. Understanding the problem of poverty is part of our presence as a church in Latin America because it may be that despite being poor we do not understand the causes of poverty or what it means.

We are going to end this section with a quote from Gualberto Villarroel, Bolivian dictator and revolutionary, who said: "I am no enemy of the rich, but I am definitely a closer friend of the poor."

The reality of the Protestant church

Latin America shows a multifaceted panorama in relation to religious reality. We have one strong native tendency that developed as a sort of syncretist religion. Justo González, in the book Cristianismo: culto o profecía: El hecho religioso andino, shows that the religious issue in Latin America is increasingly present in every aspect of life:

The world of religion thus covers every vital sphere and offers a religious range where the most varied creeds mingle, from Catholic to the prolific evangelical sects with USA written all over them, through the African and Oriental religions, thus creating a vast pool of religious rivalry that manages to make their adepts spiritual subjects, thus cancelling their identity as historical citizens and beings to involve them in an otherworldly discourse and an apocalyptic vision that predicts the rapid destruction of the profane world polluted by evil and filth.

We accept that at times some groups with their understanding of the Word and their mission to the world alienate the believers to such an extent that they lose their identity. These groups, which very often are the fastest-growing, are deeply identified with the indigenous religions, emphasizing the magical aspect:

a leader (male or female) who heals, prophesies, has special powers (they touch the people and they fall down);
stressing loud, repetitive music that breaks down rational resistance until the believers are ready for non-rational experiences.

Among these groups, the edifying effect of worship is measured by "I did feel something" or "I did not feel anything". In the words of González, the religious experience is feared, respected and accepted as something higher. Given this set of circumstances, it is important to introduce a religious adversary. Until 1990, it was communism and throughout all that time Satan was, and still is, the worst enemy. Some missiologists think that the missionary movement in Latin America, driven by North American groups, holds Islam as the main enemy of the western world and of Protestantism. This is the current religious bogeyman.

Conversely, the religious community is the bulwark and at the same time salvation for believers. In Latin America, today, religion is for some people a cause of subjection and fear and for others a cause of rebellion and hope.

Given that categorizing different churches in Latin America is far too difficult a task and one conducive to injustice, we are trying to broaden Thiselton's classification with regard to hermeneutics, in order to create a sort of study of churches in Latin America without excluding or including names.

Thiselton says that biblical interpretation went through three stages: premodernism, modernism and postmodernism. We are broadening that classification to include the word "contextual" as a stage subsequent to postmodernism and one more appropriate to Latin American thought. We believe that every church in our continent has sectors of its membership at each of these stages and as part of being the Presbyterian church in Latin America today we need to stress the contextual aspect.

In other words, our classification of the churches will depend on the way they approach biblical hermeneutics.

Churches with premodernist thought

Despite the fact that premodernist thinking is a thing of the past, religiously speaking it is still a topical subject in Latin America today. This premodernist mentality believes in everything traditional in religion and particularly everything written in the Bible, in the creeds or in the constitutions (articles of establishment). These groups maintain the infallibility of the Bible, interpreted literally or allegorically. This thinking is well-represented among the fundamentalist churches that enshrine sola fide (by faith alone) as their key concept. Probably most of the Pentecostal churches, with honourable exceptions, would be active in this group.

Churches with modernist thinking

The age of modernist thought took the Cartesian principle, Cogito, ergo sum [I think (or doubt), therefore I am], as the foundation for all thinking, including religious thinking. The key word is "doubt". Modernist thought in the churches allowed methodical doubt to be applied to biblical interpretations, to creeds and the very articles of establishment of our churches. We wish to emphasize that this stage did not seek to reject the Bible, the traditions or the constitutions, it simply sought to open up the discussion on them. These groups continue to accept the Bible as the Word of God but use the historical and critical method to arrive at interpretations. Again, we stress the fact that this religious situation is represented in many Latin American churches and that even in fundamentalist groups it is possible to find some people with modernist thinking. This thinking is more readily accepted in the historical churches, particularly in institutes of higher theological education.

Churches with postmodernist thinking

We have to make it clear that probably within this line of thinking we would not find a church but rather small groups meeting for reflection. The key word here is "suspicion". This thinking was underscored by the major gurus of postmodernism: Freud, Marx, Husserl and Bultmann. It was worked over by Liberation Theology, when suspicion arose as to the causes of poverty and the exclusion of women, blacks, Indians and the poor, and also about imported hermeneutics. Unfortunately, the religious circles that gave space to this sort of thinking failed to put their discourse into practice.

Churches with contextualized thinking

It goes without saying that Thiselton did not consider the contextualization phase as part of hermeneutics. We understand by contextualization the effort to relate biblical and theological truths to the specific situation of any given community. Thus, contextualized groups and churches use the Bible to try and find guidelines to help make the divine message more alive in the midst of the prevailing poverty, oppression, syncretism and underdevelopment suffered in Latin America. The key word is "commitment".

In Latin America we have fundamentalist groups that could be said to adhere to the sola fide concept. The next group, which is now not in the majority, is made up of believers with a higher academic level of education; they manage to rationalize faith, and stress the traditional liturgy with meaning. The churches with postmodernist groups are those that, influenced by the social sciences, emphasize suspicion and form a small elite very often found in the dome of the church structure. With an interest in contextualizing, we find the Base Christian communities, both Catholic and Protestant, usually small, and often using premodernist, modernist and postmodernist concepts, but wanting to place the biblical message in context within their own communities.

In closing this section, we suspect that if we want the church filled to overflowing, we would have to simplify the message, use very loud popular music and be open to syncretism, since the Latin American masses are not prepared to learn through discourse, as is usual in the Presbyterian churches, but rather through their emotions.

A Reformed and Presbyterian proposal is probably not going to reach the multitudes, but could easily be embodied through a minority contextualized within the Latin American situation.

Pathways of Christian commitment to being the Presbyterian Church in Latin America today

Throughout this address, we have included Presbyterian in the title because we believe that even today a historical church such as ours can and must communicate the living message of Jesus Christ to Latin America.

Latin American circumstances are undergoing transformation where the only constant is change. Our pathways to being a church have to start from the changing circumstances. A proposal that claims to be static and final is, from the outset, condemned to be outdated. Our proposal is the product, to some extent, of our own pilgrimage, of an analysis of the social situation, of our commitment to the church as an institution and our commitment to the church as a contextualized community. For this reason, we only claim to offer pathways (not models) that may serve as testimonies and prove helpful to our Latin American sisters and brothers.

First pathway: Faithfully Reformed communities

The two major contradictions of the Presbyterian and Reformed churches in Latin America may be (a) calling themselves Presbyterian and claiming to be faithful to Calvinism but living out a static fundamentalism for fear of social or religious change; (b) calling themselves Presbyterian, but with a Pentecostal liturgy and theology in a desire to swell the numbers and not be criticized as cold and banal.

As we are emphasizing the Calvinist and Reformed sense of the Presbyterian church, we advocate the study and practice of our Reformed inheritance that among other things emphasized the central importance of the Word, the sovereignty of God, the universal ministry of all believers, men and women, and the equality of all human beings.

We know that one of the major problems in Latin America is poverty. In this regard Calvin said that the rich man is rich as part of God's plan to serve the poor (Sermon on Deut 24.19-22) since in that fashion the rich man could find God. It was Calvin who said that to take a man's job away from him was like taking his life. He also asked "what greater violence can be done than to leave those who through their labour put food in our mouths to die of hunger and poverty?" As far as Calvin was concerned, the poor were victims of society's sin, the poor were the body of Christ. Giving to the poor was not charity but paying a debt.

Another of the major problems for the Presbyterian churches in Latin America is the ordination of women. In this regard, Professor Jane Dempsey Douglass begins chapter 3 of her book Women, Freedom and Calvin with a critical analysis of some of the articles and books written about Calvin's thinking with regard to women. She rejects some of the conclusions reached in those documents and goes on to offer her own analysis by comparing two versions of Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536 and 1559) finding that in the latter Calvin was more open to allowing women to work in the church. After studying some key texts on the role of women in the church, using Calvin's commentaries, Professor Douglass comes to five conclusions: (1) that in the 1559 version Calvin had another viewpoint on the subject of the subordination of women and considered that women could be deaconesses; (2) that Calvin, commenting on the First Letter to the Corinthians, deemed restrictions on women to be part of human government and not divine law; (3) that when commenting on 1 Cor 11.7, Calvin placed women and men on an equal footing as created in the image of God; (4) that Calvin, even knowing the problem that it would cause to place women in roles of authority in the church, stressed that some of the women that worked with Paul had held the office of deaconesses; (5) that Calvin's teaching on freedom could be the most hopeful for including women in the ordained ministry of the church, but that it passed unnoticed for three hundred and fifty years.

Second pathway: Inclusive communities

Given the disintegration and discrimination experienced in Latin America, Reformed and Presbyterian communities should present an inclusive gospel in economic affairs, so as to encompass both rich and poor; in liturgical matters, to embrace European and indigenous aspects; in racial matters, to include blacks, Indians and whites; in matters of gender, to offer equal opportunity and responsibility; in partnership, for men and women; in ecumenical matters, to work with other Christian groups in expanding the kingdom. I draw your attention to the fact that Calvin considered all human beings as equal because all are sinners and condemned.

One example is to be found in the World Alliance of Reformed Churches that set up the PACT programme (Programme to Affirm, Question and Transform Partnership between Women and Men in the Church and in Society) that emphasizes joint work-teamwork-by men and women in the church's mission.

As to economic aspects, there has been very little participation by the Presbyterian communities in the analysis, criticism or proposals concerning the establishment of a just social and economic order.

As for an inclusive approach to the liturgy, this has been controversial. Very often we support in almost unbearable fashion the European and North American liturgy, rejecting everything that relates to Afro-Indian culture. In other instances, we fall into a sort of "indigenous" liturgy with guitars and drums that give a fair imitation of rock music, abandoning Reformed aspects of the liturgy and even the Afro-Indian aspects of our cultures.

Third pathway: Committed communities

We make a distinction between inclusiveness and commitment because very often inclusiveness is accepted as a theoretical element in Presbyterianism, but set aside in practice. Inclusiveness becomes passive and we think it necessary to have the sort of commitment that confers rights on those who do not have them. In our view, commitment should be more pro-active. We must keep the commitment to life, to the poor and marginalized and to nature.

Fourth pathway: Evangelizing communities

The Catholic bishops, meeting in Santo Domingo in 1992, declared a new evangelization of Latin America. That declaration shows that they agree with us that Latin America is not an evangelized continent. Many Christians in the United States and Europe think that evangelization is not needed on the continent since it is historically regarded as Christian. When we look at the facts of structural and personal sin in our continent, we are convinced on the contrary that wholesale evangelization is needed. We are not inviting the contextualized communities to proselytize in other communities. But we are inviting them to work together with other churches (including the Catholic Church) to reach those that have no church commitment.

In closing, we could say that we need a Presbyterian church that presents a project of evangelization, that both addresses life as a whole and sets us free, a project that covers spiritual and material needs, that strives for women and men to achieve their humanity-their being-as a paradigm for true liberty.

Questions

What could the relationship of the churches be to governments that continue to maintain the historical system of oppression and dehumanization?
What action could we take so as to put into practice the idea of inclusiveness within our churches, particularly in terms of equality between men and women?
What action would be appropriate to fulfil our evangelistic commitment in Latin America?

Dr Guidoberto Mahecha is Professor of New Testament, Theological Seminary of Fortaleza of the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil