"Here in Colombia we have seen the cruelty of a fratricidal war which leaves women widowed and children orphaned, attacks liberty, destroys biodiversity with its crop-spraying programmes, and increases the militarization of society." So says the final document from the 4th general assembly of the Latin American Council of Churches, which took place in Barranquilla, Colombia, in January. The long-running war in Colombia between government troops and right-wing paramilitaries and leftist guerrillas has left tens of thousands dead and more than two million people internally displaced.

"It is sinful and perverse," the assembly flatly declares, "for some sectors of Colombian society to suggest war as the only way out of a conflict whose roots lies in socioeconomic inequality." It expresses concern that government strategy will spread the conflict into neighbouring countries, such as Ecuador.

The assembly received written greetings from the nation's president, Andrés Pastrana, as well as the National Liberation Army, one of the country's two major guerrilla groups. But Milciades Pua, a Presbyterian minister in Barranquilla, warned that CLAI should be wary of greetings from the president: "The hand which signed the letter to CLAI is the same hand which signed the Plan Colombia for the destruction of our people, the intensification of the war for the destruction of the peasantry and their land, and for the creation of even more displaced people," he said.

Plan Colombia is a US-backed revision of an anti-drug, anti-war strategy championed by Pastrana. Originally, the plan focused largely on providing economic alternatives in rural areas that depend on the cultivation of coca, the raw material for the manufacture of cocaine. In the US version, the emphasis switches to military assistance. Most of the $1.3 billion in US aid will go to provide 63 high-tech military helicopters to the Colombian military and police and to increase dramatically the presence of US troops.

"Plan Colombia is short on everything that would avoid war: human rights, justice, and a democratic system," Lilia Solano, president of the Latin American Theological Fraternity, told the assembly. "So the US aid will not serve to end the war, but rather to make the war worse."

Much of the aid from Washington would end up back in US bank accounts, she said. "Meanwhile, we, like useful idiots, continue to follow orders that destroy the country."

"Colombia's churches started very discreetly and very fearfully, but have begun to try to resolve the conflict," Milton Mejía, general secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, told ENI.

The churches have been directly affected by the country's lingering violence. Church buildings have been closed, pastors murdered, and whole congregations displaced.

"We can best contribute to peace by joining with civil society and contributing to the solutions being developed there," Mejía said. "What Colombia needs is for people to get involved in resolving the problems, not leaving it to the government, the army, the guerrillas, and the paramilitaries."

At an evening session on January 16, dozens of children, members of musical groups linked to Presbyterian churches and schools in Colombia, shared their hopes for peace in this troubled nation and beyond. They spoke of peace in homes and in schoolrooms, of an end to corruption, of the sharing of land with the landless, and of an end to kidnapping and child labour.

The evening concluded with the regional inauguration of the Decade to Overcome Violence initiated by the World Council of Churches. Delegates recited a pledge committing their churches to work for a peace "which will come from the hands of the simple, the humble, the poor of the earth, and will be announced from the mouths of children, and to the sound of the music of youth."

CLAI was founded in 1978 in Oaxtepec, Mexico. Its membership includes about 150 churches in 21 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

"These churches," notes WARC theology secretary Odair Pedroso Mateus, who comes from Brazil, "share an economic background marked by underdevelopment, a cultural background marked by Iberian (and later British and North American) violence against native and African people, and a religious background marked by the regional hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, today increasingly called into question by the development of a religious pluralism evidenced by the rapid growth of Pentecostalism and the less noticed, yet quite significant, growth of Afro-American religions."

In his keynote address to a consultation on mission that preceded the assembly, Arturo Piedra told CLAI some home truths. It had been inept in communicating new or alternative ideas and this, combined with "an arrogant desire" to tell the historic Protestant churches what to do, had sometimes provoked rejection. Nor had CLAI helped its cause by giving the impression that it "had assumed, at times uncritically, all of the agenda of the political left, in which the utility of faith was measured in terms of social change".

Some 50 Reformed participants met as a confessional family in the first day of the Assembly. We were the largest confessional group. I made a short presentation on the church process on covenanting for justice in the economy and the earth. I encouraged Epifanio Márquez - secretary of AIPRAL, the Alliance's Latin American region - to organize an email list of the Reformed participants. I am also setting up email lists of member churches as well as theological seminaries to send them communiqués and final reports of dialogues and studies. I hope that very soon the Reformed theological and church leadership in Latin America will be well informed about our work. I was able to meet with leaders from WARC member churches in several countries (Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil). From Barranquilla, Epifanio Márquez and I called El Salvador to get information about the effects of the earthquake on Reformed communities in that country.

Odair Pedroso Mateus

"It lost sight of the fact that the preaching of the gospel affects individuals as well as societies, families as well as political institutions," he added.

Piedra, a professor of theology and church history at the Latin American Biblical University in San José, Costa Rica, served on the WARC-sponsored "mobile theological faculty" that taught classes in Equatorial Guinea last year and will also represent WARC in the Reformed-Seventh Day Adventist dialogue this April. A Costa Rican, he was expelled in 1985 from his nation's Association of Biblical Churches because of his progressive views. He then helped to found the Fraternity of Evangelical Churches of Costa Rica, a WARC member church since 1992.

Piedra praised CLAI for its "commitment to marginalized majorities and its valuation of Latin American theological thinking". But, he said, it was "absurd" to adopt positions "that ended up forming prophets without people, radicals whose proposals and language were only understood by a few".

CLAI needed to "extend the horizons" of the churches, he told the consultation, but with "pastoral wisdom rather than vanguard positions or rhetorical messianism, and without labelling those who disagree with its point of view". Its future depended on its relevance to the churches. "It makes no sense to belong to an association of churches that represents little for the life of the churches."

Moves to open up CLAI to the Pentecostal churches which have been spreading like wildfire in Latin America divided opinions in the assembly.

"Pentecostal faith offers a lot to the historic churches," Carlos Támez, a professor at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of Mexico, told ENI. "Bit by bit the historic churches have been parking themselves in a liturgical, doctrinal, and disciplinary structure that has prevented us from fully living out the gospel. Pentecostal faith helps get us closer to the spirituality of the people, the poor."

Pentecostals were not all alike, Támez emphasized. "There are new currents, like neo-pentecostals and those who believe in spiritual warfare or proclaim the theology of prosperity, that need to be closely examined and even criticized," he said. "We need to ask about the ideological project behind these expressions, analysing the global changes they propose. And we need to distinguish between the real or imagined caricatures of Pentecostalism on the one hand, and Pentecostal faith on the other."

"We need to open up to these new dimensions of faith in the region," he concluded. "That doesn't mean that we have to abandon the projects of CLAI that focus on justice and love and solidarity. Those aren't at risk here. What's at risk is our own openness to the new contexts and new opportunities that this new millennium is bringing to us."

Reformed participants were cautiously optimistic about the outcome of the assembly.

"We've got to accept opening the doors of CLAI to new churches not as something that's going to water down our witness," said Noemí Espinoza, a Reformed Church of Honduras delegate to the assembly and first vice-president of the new executive committee, "but rather as something that will deepen our faith, fortify our social witness, and give resonance to our prophetic voice".

WARC/ENI