Idea exchange
From CubaPartners
This section is a place to exchange background information, inspirations and reflections for everyone to consider in planning the conferencia.
The Accra Faith Statement from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches is provided by Mairolet for your consideration.
End of Week visits to the Local IPRC Churches. Visiting pastor assignments:
Church-Iglesia Visiting Pastor
Caibarien Peter Nord
Remedios Ken Kovacs
Camajuani JoAnne Torrie and Christa Burns
Sagua la Grande Katherine Foster Conners
Calabazar de Sagua Brett Morgan
Encrucijada Deb Milcarek and John Walter
Placetas Dean Lewis
Cabaiguan Sandra Losemann
Paraiso Obrero Roger Powers
Taguasco Liz Johnson
Meneses Tricia Sidle
Iguara
Sancti Spiritus Jennifer DiFrancesco
The Presbyterian Church and its Integral Mission by: Daniel Montoya, IPRC
Introduction: The missiological task: “All of the Gospel for all of the Person”.
All Christian churches agree in affirming that the church has a missionary mandate. However, the interpretation of this mandate has been a difficult problem for the early church, for all contemporary confessions, as well as for the ecumenical movement. So, in tackling the theme of “Essential Mission” from the reformed perspective we have to begin by asking ourselves a question: “What are, or should be, the constituent elements of the mission of the church?”
Ordinarily, we have interpreted the mission of the church principally in terms of proclaiming the Gospel, envisioning the principal task to be that of calling people to a explicit commitment with Jesus Christ. By adopting this emphasis, we affirm that personal salvation linked to the sinful nature of every human being is the primary mission of the church.
This limited understanding of mission has been challenged within ecumenical discussions and other denominational clashes. Therefore, we must begin by defining mission as the continuation of Jesus’ plan; and this plan was the Kingdom and not the Church. The concept of Kingdom is integral (holistic): It includes the material, the ecological, cultural, and the spiritual. We do not do mission in order that the church grows or is fortified; rather, we do it in order that the kingdom is strengthened.
So states Harvey Cox: “The kingdom of the Shalom of God is that to which strangers are invited, where the poor find true satisfaction, the sick are restored, and the earth itself finds its renewal.” ¹
The core message of the Old Testament is found in the exodus from Egypt, as Israel’s act of liberation from Egypt’s economic and political slavery. The prophets of the Old Testament continually interpreted the correct relation with God in terms of the establishment of justice and the search to free society’s poor and marginalized from oppression.
In Jesus’ ministry we see the three dimensions of mission: The affirmation of forgiveness and the love of God; the ministry of physical needs of the people (healthiness, feed the hungry, expel the demons) and the scolding of the institutions which were perpetuating false religion.
Therefore, we must reject all intents to see the ministry of healthiness of the human spirit, the meeting of physical needs, and the challenge of unjust social structures as mutually exclusive or in opposition to each other.
Since “to speak of the entire Gospel, or the complete Gospel, is to speak of the Gospel as the good news of Jesus Christ for the personal as well as societal life, as to the spiritual as well as material sphere, as to present time as well as eternity…the whole Gospel is the Gospel that maintains unity between faith and all the works, between the Word and action, between love and justice, between reconciliation with God and one’s neighbor, between theology and ethics.²
In this way the mission of the church should be directed at everyone to restore the fullness of their lives, and this includes the ministries that aid them in satisfying their personal needs. Both demands should be placed in the context of the need to create social and political structures that seek equality and justice for everyone. (he uses todos-as to include both masculine and feminine aspects. Translators note)
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the countries of “Western Christianity” took upon themselves the responsibility of evangelizing the world. The first worldwide conference celebrated in Edinburg in 1910 was inspired by this evangelizing enthusiasm. The Protestant churches and missions sent missionaries to Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, and other parts of the world. Therefore, the “model” of mission remained fixed by the concept of “sending from North to
South” and the vision of planting churches in the pagan world.”
The “receiving” countries were taken by storm, expecting them to contribute little or nothing to the mission work. “Transculturalization” was effected without great confrontations. In many cases the limits of preaching the authentic Gospel were violated, brought by the “carpetbagger missionaries” to propagate racism or separatist ideologies that did not form part of the “cultural ethos” of many of our nations.
Taking my own country Cuba for example: It is valid to point out that the missionary movement could not identify itself with our “mulata” culture. Racism arrived alongside pietism with the individualistic and moralistic ethic of the missionaries.
In speaking of the responsibility of mission, we must carefully analyze this concept of “churches that send and churches that receive”. We should consider this idea alongside the concept of mission as found in the New Testament.
The resuscitated Christ before the Ascension called out to the local faith community, he gathered them around himself and sent them to be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth. Additionally, reading the book Acts of the Apostles, we find that the community of the faithful has become a “missionary community”. (Acts 2: 43-7)
In the ecumenical movement we learned from the Western Churches the emphasis of life and the liturgy in the church as an essential part of mission. Mission is the central task of the church, not necessarily special agencies organized for this project. The local church is the most effective instrument for mission and the inexhaustible source of ministerial vocations.
We may agree with David J. Bosh who said, “The church in mission is ~ first of all ~ the local church in whatever part of the world. This perspective, as well as the supposition which no local church should adopt an authoritative position against another local church, are fundamental principals in the New Testament, (See Acts 13: 1-3 and Paul’s letters.) but were practical objectives disregarded for a long time in Christian history.”
This does not mean that foreign missions have reached their objectives, rather that the proposals and alternatives will need to be different.
In Cuba, we will always be thankful for the policy of the Board of Presbyterian Mission of the PCUSA. They always kept sight of the fact that their first task was to create leaders capable of continuing the mission ministries in our midst.
At the time of the Cuban Revolution, when the missionaries left, the Presbyterian Church in Cuba was the only one that had leaders with a biblical training ~ a solid theological which permitted us to assume not only the governing of the Church, but also to be active participants of the ecumenical leadership at local, national, and international levels.
At the same time, the departure of the Mission Board along with the exodus of Cuban pastors in the Post-Revolution was painful as it depleted the pastoral body leaving many local churches inadequately supported. In this vacuum the dialogue and adequate theological reflection permitted us to see that the mission of the church was not determined by a specific social system, but rather that even in Socialism the work of God (Obra de Dios) continued.
Today, when our churches are full, beehives of children and young adults, it’s necessary to say that this phenomenon was not due only to the improved relations between church and state, or to the so called “Special Period” when the embargo and the worsening economic situation exploded in such a way that the Cuban churches today have become Diaconal spaces where social services and projects are carried out for the population in need.
We firmly believe that this “Evangelistic and Missionary Awakening” is deep rotted in the church, a residual which remained within Cuba soil, accomplishing mission, producing a new hymnology which has enriched our liturgies, returning to the Scriptures to read it in permanent dialogue with our reality, that which we call: “A New Reading of the Bible”; writing our own Christian educational materials ~ or rather~ contextualizing the life of the congregation, inserting ourselves in society with love and effective testimony and with the certainty we had that the “Church is here to stay”.
The Confession of Faith that the IPRC produced in 1977 expresses some of our profound convictions concerning the mission of our church in the middle of deep social shifting. For us the first principles of mission are made up of three basic aspects: The Incarnation, Witness, and Liberation.
In all of these tasks we were greatly assisted and supported by the solidarity of sister churches in different parts of the world, which led us to believe that we could not do this alone, no one can. We need to dialogue with the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America as well as the mission boards at continental and international levels.
Partnerships in mission are vital. The challenges of mission are so great that we cannot assume them alone…and I’m not thinking about just economic or materialistic resources, rather in the sense that we need to clarify theologically our missionary projects to enable us to accept our differences and to be able to continue creatively developing the vision and alternative mission necessary for the historic reality that confronts us today.
We need to remember that there is no previous paradigm to bring this about. Do such premises exist, like the interrelation between 1) mission and nation / people, 2) mission and national and regional history, 3) mission and culture, 4) mission and society? Given that mission need is ubiquitous, there can be no distinctions made between the churches that send and the churches that receive. We can speak of a fraternity between the churches in their common call to mission.
Therefore, in speaking of mission responsibility, we need to deepen our understanding of the terms like “the nature of congregational mission” and “how to equip the local church for mission”.
As Walter Bruegemann (6) affirms: We are living times of dislocation, with many modern societies in disintegration, so that they appear similar to the age of Israel’s exile. Dislocation always creates a marginalized class, economically punishing the most vulnerable. However, the Bible presents dislocation as a motive to construct a more just society.
Bruegemann points out four truths that the people of God learned that can provide us with the resources capable of delivering us from denial and desperation to possibility.
1. The necessity to change brutal loss by acts of faith which in turn engender positive energy (Lamentations 1,2; Psalms 79,137)
2. The need to reorder and remake life through the intention of maintaining communion with God, through inviting Him to come and live with us. This being what the priests of Leviticus called “ordinate godliness” or the sacred mindset that encompasses all life; the awareness that here and now we are before the sure and demanding presence of God.
3. The need to establish a sense of community, because dislocation brings with it the temptation to becomes egotistically self involved. To maintain a public economy of compassion and justice is the form to far surpass desperation. (Deut. 10: 18-19, the year if remission)
4. The need to assert that God can create sew social possibilities, far surpassing the failed horizons of the past. To accomplish this we need to be emotional, liturgical, imaginative.
The need to develop a vision of the future where the means to speak and act are offered, expressing new social possibilities of communal transformation focused on those in need.
The need to listen to the call of God, asking us to re-involve ourselves with the pain of the world and the possibility of its renovation and salvation. Our missionary activity is accomplished within the framework of these “times of uprootedness” where the contexts of poverty, war, unemployment, and exclusion are common to us all.
If we take the context of mission seriously, it signifies that missionary activity must be relevant to local institutions.
If we make a verification of the context in which missionary effort lives and develops we find that it’s a context of poverty and savage capitalism that extols and consolidates globalization, each instance to the service of fewer people, converting the thirst for profit and money into a god that demands sacrifices without taking into consideration social cost and the humans who have to pay. (7)
Confronted by this reality, which implies imbalance in daily life of our nations, the Theology of Exile leads us to preach and promote the Theology of Life which implies the defense of life through human rights in the civil, political, social, cultural, and ecological senses… adopting a radical option for the defense of life which affirms the possibility of a material and spiritual fullness, that which includes the experience of esthetic enjoyment, creative development, and the affirmation of dignity for each living being. (8)
III. The Main Points of the Utopian for Mission
Paul Tillich describes for us in majestic form the characteristics of utopia. Utopia is real because it expresses the essence of a human being, the central objective of his life.
Through our experiences here in Cuba we have learned that this utopic emphasis must include the social and personal because it’s impossible to have the one without the other. A utopia defined socially loses its intrinsic truth if at the same time it does not integrate the person, therefore we cannot define individual utopia if we do not include the social.
Today “The art of healthiness” serves as an illustration. We cannot be healed outside our social context; and the social cannot produce all the personal individual health we need.
The second positive characteristic of utopia is bearing fruit. This means that utopia opens for us the possibilities that seemed lost. The cultures that remain closed without utopia find themselves imprisoned in the present without a vision for the future.
The third characteristic of the utopia that Paul Tillich teaches us is power. Yes! Utopia is capable of changing the established!
Judaism is most likely the world’s greatest example of all Utopian movements because it brought all humanity to another level of existence through a utopia based on the Coming of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, no utopia has power if it’s exclusively economic, intellectual, or religious. It must be holistic including all of those aspects. Furthermore there are possibilities and impossibilities in utopia, and when one is confronted with only the impossibilities for its realization, the next thing to come is a paralyzing disillusionment.
Thus we need to think as Leonardo Boff, who spoke of utopias in long, medium, and short periods.
Thus when we consider the prophetic line of the Old Testament we discover in the great prophets an oscillation or dialectic movement between a partial transcendence ~ which we can call utopia in the political sense ~ and a radical transcendence which indicates the irruption of the Divine which breaks the entire horizontal dimension.
The political, social, economical, and the intellectual are all present in the prophetic texts; but at the same time they go far beyond history itself because the contain an apocalyptic ~ eschatological element which transcends as the utopian vision of Isaiah 65, a Kingdom of Peace where humans, the animals and creation form a reconciled peaceful and harmonious unity.
Therefore, mission must be sustained by hope, the opposite of the culture of despair which tries to eliminate the open horizons for our people.
Is it possible to have a culture of hope opposite the despair and agony of death of our society which suffers from the battering of unemployment and hunger as a consequence of economic, political, ideological, and religious systems of out time?
Walter Altmann, a Brazilian Lutheran theologian affirms (10) “Yes, we can and must” because our hope is based on:
First: the testimony of resistance and the capacity of survival of all oppressed groups. Especially the indigenous, blacks, and women.
Second: we celebrate our hope in our liturgy, through the festive songs of our peoples, with our prayers and Bible studies. The doxological and eschatological are found in these celebrations.
Third: the ultimate dignity of human beings cannot be suffocated. All totalitarian governments have experienced this fact.
The theological reality is expressed in the concept of the Image of God. We can pervert it totally but we cannot annihilate it. This “Image of God” irrupts when oppression seems to be at its worst; and even when entire populations can be eliminated (90 million indigenous) ~ the image of God remains in the memory of God. The exterminated are received in the heart ~ the cosmic heart of God
I totally enjoyed reading the book by Dorothee Söelle called Celebrating the Resistance; (11) in this book she shares stories of Latin America that struggle against the “luxury of despair”. She finishes her book with an affirmation of creative hope and a poem which is reminiscent of the text from Romans 4: 18, Hope against hope.
“The miraculous stories that I have included in this book do not carry through well in writing them; but the people who played the star role and discovered these miracles have managed to evangelize me. The base their hope in something beyond power and money and have extracted from me (my person) the false certainty of the values that I considered fundamental. They do not permit the cynicism of despair overwhelm them.”
She ends with a poem by Saif Vaage, Lima, Peru:
They asked me
What is the source of my hope?
I answered, It’s not my hope
Rather that of the poor.
It’s significant that the Eighth Assembly of the World Council of Churches set to be celebrated in December of this year took for its general theme “Search for God with the Joy of Hope” The text that inspired this appeal is from Romans 15:13 “and (may) the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you abound in hope through the Holy Spirit.”
Yes! What we really need is…Mission which encourages hope!
IV. The Mission, the Gospel and the Cultures.
Given that mission in Jesus Christ was extended far beyond the immediate Jewish context of his ministry, everything related to the Gospel and culture has become as source for concern to the church.
It’s interesting to return to chapter fifteen of the book, Acts of the Apostles to analyze how the Jerusalem Council confronted the first and most fundamental crisis of the relationship between the Gospel and the cultures.
Judaism mainly confronted the problem of converted groups of uncircumcised gentiles by saying they were not “under the law”. Was it necessary that the gentiles converted by Paul and Barabbas be circumcised in order to live within the law? The Council firmly believed that Judaism was a necessary step to become a Christian.
Paul and Barabbas on the other hand maintained that the message based in Grace had freed the Gentiles for the obligations of Judaism. We’re all familiar with the ending: Gentiles needed not to convert to Judaism first in order to become Christians.
We know as well that historically, when Christianity was a minority sect, it incorporated much from the Roman culture within which was extended the missionary work.
Many of the philosophic and theological orientations of Western and Eastern Christian thought incorporate cultural elements from within their own local sphere.
The church in mission must seriously consider local culture and religion if they want to avoid being considered foreign and alien.
There have been many attempts to relate the Gospel with the cultures and the contexts where it has been proclaimed. They’ve taken various names: Indigenization, acculturation, contextualization; however, these processes have not been sufficiently rigorous in dealing with “the issue of power” which played an important function in the presentation of the Gospel in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Pablo Süess (12) a Brazilian Methodist pastor narrates this history told by an indigenous person to North American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict:
“An indigenous chief said to her: God created clay for all the people and permitted each of them to make a jug from the clay to drink the water of life. When the missionaries came they broke the jug telling us that now we had to drink the water of life from the jugs they’d brought. Ours was broken, and now they made us drink the water of life from the one they’d given us. We felt very sad and unhappy because of this.”
All nations have been received and raised in their respective culture to drink the water of life, and we were made to learn to drink it from a vessel that was not made by our own hands. When we impose the other vessel upon them, it becomes a cultural as well as personal act of destruction for those who receive the devastating impact.
We must recognize the theological and religious pluralism of our continent at the end of this spine chilling and unsettled century.
The Latin American and Caribbean religious ambient is characterized by an intense mobility and growing diversity. The continent, or at least Latin America, was understood for many centuries to be homogenous from the religious perspective, that is to say: Catholic. Today it is more often characterized by religious pluralism. The growth of some Pentecostal movements, particularly Neo-Pentecostalism is becoming astonishing. Its expression of faith is coming to be embraced with fervor by multitudes.
On the other hand, a more silent process can be observed, but even one of profound depth: the rediscovery of indigenous and African expressions before lived in obscurity when not in social clandestinely. (13)
Juan C. Scannone insists in the wisdom of the people and their theology, making us see that acculturation is already dispersed in the popular Latin Americn culture, its wisdom and its religiosity.
The image of Dr. Phillip Potter has always fascinated me hen he told us we needed to cooperate with God to make a “Oikoumene” (the inhabited world), a “oikos” a home, a family of men and women of various gifts, cultures, and possibilities where openness, trust, love and justice reign. This “oikos” can be nothing other than a house of dialogue between cultures.
The consideration of pluralism leads us to the second aspect which we want to consider in discussing this theme.
V. Evangelics and Pentecostals: The Challenges of New Missionary Agents.
Juan Sepúlveda, a Chilean Pentecostal Pastor, calls us to seriously consider the predictions of David S. Barretts in the World Christian Encyclopedia where it says that “at the end of the Twentieth Century Christian Pentecostals (in their know traditions: classical Pentecostals, the charismatic movement within the traditional church, the Neo-Pentecostals, and the indigenous non-white churches) will be able to reach a membership of 200 million”. This is the same number as all the members of the protestant churches today; and he insists in “our lack of knowledge and understanding of the meaning of the Pentecostal experience”.
In relation to the Evangelics we can say that the qualitative leap they have taken is impressive, not only in their theological reflection, but also in their coordinated actions to participate actively in social changes. In reading the book of CLADE III (the Third Latin-American Congress on Evangelization) celebrated in Quito in 1992, we are moved by the words such as those by René Padilla, “CLADE, for the most part challenges us to relate this knowledge with the other growth, that of social problems. Nothing is going awry with our ecclesiology if we aspire to construct great temples which give capacity to our MEGA IGLESIAS but we close our eyes to the MEGAMISERY that surrounds us. Nothing wrong with our Missiology if we preach John 3: 16 (For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son, so that…) but we conveniently forget I John 3: 16-17, (By this we know love, that He…that we also give our lives for our brothers…and he who has riches in this world, at seeing his brother in need and shuts his heart against him, How can the love of God dwell in him?) (15)
We need to analyze ecclesiastically and theologically what Richard Shaull called “the option of the poor for Pentecostalism”. (16) Clearly we cannot understand the total religious situation in Latin America without taking into account what Pentecostalism represents for the great majorities of impoverished in our continent.
We must ask ourselves in this Consultation if these popular forms of Protestantism have converted themselves to be depositories of the inheritance of the Protestant Reformation. Have they appropriated from the universal priesthood of believers in ecclesiastical forms many more participants that our historic churches? Will there be continuity of Reformed Protestantism in these popular movements?
As a challenge I wanted to mention the phrase of Manuel Escobar: (17) “Classical Protestantism emphasizes the continuity in truth for the Word. Popular Protestantism emphasizes the continuity in life for the Spirit. Only the union of both will bring about a surge in the Protestant movement capable of confronting the Twenty First Century.”
VI Mission and the Unity of the Church.
“I urge you”, wrote the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians, “to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”
The Biblical text indicates to us that the question of visible unity was a source of worry to the church in the New Testament times. The divisions manifested in then are comparable to those our churches face today.
(I Corinthians 1:12-13) One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos.”; another, “I follow Cephas.”; still another, “I follow Christ.” Paul confronts them saying, “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?”
There were other divisions centered upon the interpretation of the nature of Christian life insisting that there must be special manifestations of the Spirit to be a true Christian. This sounds relatively common to us today, doesn’t it? But Paul brings them up short again, saying:
“There are diverse gifts, but the Spirit is the same. There are diverse Ministries, but the same Lord. There are diverse works, but the same God works all of them in all men.” I Corinthians 12: 4-6
Naturally, he shows them the most excellent way which sweeps away all division, the way of love found in I Corinthians 13.
What’s significant in all these threats to unity in the Early Church is that for the apostles, it was quite clear that Christ’s Church is one, and that this unity in Christ must be apparent in the life of the congregations in each of the places where it is found. The Creed itself attempts to preserve this truth despite all the divisions that the church has suffered. We believe in: One holy catholic and apostolic church.
What are some of the fundamental elements of this unity? How does this manifest itself? In the first place, we must never stop fighting for the visible unity of our churches knowing that the mandate is clear: “…that they be one so that the world will believe” (John 17:21) Of course we carry the conviction that unity is a gift of God, therefore the unity of the church is a reality in Christ Jesus. By definition, the Church is the body of Christ; therefore the search for unity must always be understood in terms of making the unity we have in Christ visible.
As John Brown Campbell says, “The search for Christian unity is a response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ: the recognition that God is present in all things that unify, creates and makes whole. This leads us to transcend our human divisions…at a time when the World Council of Churches began speaking of unity in the church and mankind, a new and more exact meaning of unity began to be understood and articulated…we can now speak of unity as something central to our faith, but this expected day will never come unless we realize that part of the search for unity is to end racism, sexism, economic superiority and exploitation forever.” (19)
If the unity of the church could take visible expression in a local sense, then we must always be looking for a model – or models- that could give visibility to the unity of the church in its universal dimension. This model at the universal level can be found in the First Century Church as “the Fraternal Council”.
As a result of the Apostle’s ministries, churches were established in the different parts of the world in which they lived. When divisive problems and doctrinal questions arose they all came to the council meetings, since it was the Councils that made the universal unity of the Church of Jesus Christ possible.
Today, in our search for unity we need to return to the biblical concept of Koinonia and aspire to carry out in our ecclesial life the spirit of communion in faith, testimony, and life in each local congregation and in each of our confessions.
By this radical process we are led to the consideration of the Eucharistic community and hospitality as fundamentals for a efficacious testim9ony in our contemporary world. As the study document says in the Fifth Conference of Faith and Constitution celebrated in Santiago de Compostela in 1993: “The church as koinonia is called to share not only the suffering of its own community, rather the suffering of all communities: defending the cause of the poor, the needy and the marginalized, and being at their service, summoning all one’s forces to pursue justice and peace in all of the human societies; practicing and promoting a responsible administration for Creation, and keeping Hope alive in the heart of mankind. The Diakonia for everyone cannot dissociate itself in the koinonia. (20)
Conclusion: Mission as an Invitation to Life.
Mission must be understood as an invitation to the future of God. (21) It is the actualization of the Gospel of Hope and the Diakonia of Love. In the original theological sense of the word, mission means “Missio Dei” or “The one sent by God”.
According to the Judeo-Christian biblical conception, God sends his Spirit to this world through Christ. It is the Spirit who gives life; therefore it is called “the Spirit of life or Source of life. What God brings to the world through Christ is defined by the Gospel according to John as one word: Life. “I love, and you also will love.” (John 14:19)
This means full life, completely vivacious, common, eternal: Abundant life. This vital force of God will be ~ according to the prophetic message ~ “spilled out upon all flesh”. According to the language of the Old Testament, this means “upon all living things”. That which is sent by God is not anthropocentric, rather bio-centric. It has nothing to do with world, political, or religious dominion over men or women, nor even the salvation of human souls, rather the liberation, salvation, and redemption of life in general. Its object is the Recreation of all things.
Jesus did not bring a new religion to the world, rather new life. He did not institute Christianity nor erect a power of the church over the people; instead he brought life to this world of violence and death, “that which has existed since the beginning, of which we have heard and seen with our own eyes and touched with our own hands, It deals with the word of life.
This life manifests itself, we see it and give testimony of it, and we proclaim to you this eternal life.” (I John 1: 1-2)
Christ is the divine salvation of life. This affirmation brings healing to the sick, deliverance to the marginalized, pardon from sins and the salvation of life from life rent by the powers of destruction…or so it is taught to those sent by the Gospel, the nature of mission of men and women who live in its Spirit. (Matthew 10: 7-8)
1. Cox, Harvey, Mission in the Americas, National Council of Churches, 1998
2. Padilla, Rene, Todo el Evangelico para todos los pueblos desde America Latina, CLAUDE III, The third Latin American Congress on Evangelization, Quito 1992
3. Cepeda, Rafael, la Herencia Misionera en Cuba 1986.
4. Bosh, David, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 1991
5. Bolioli, Oscar, Hope and Justice in the Americas, NCC, New York, 1998
6. Bruegmann, Walter, The Christian Century, #20, 1997.
7. ibid, p. 29
8. Opposite citing, page 31
9. Tillich, Paul, Critique and Justification of Utopia, Beacon Press, 1967
10. Altmann, Walter, An Attempt to Summarize, in: Ministerial Formation, WCC Geneva, No. 59, October 1992, pp.51-57
11. Soelle, Dorothee, Celebrating Resistance: The Way of the Cross in Latin America, Noweway, London, 1993
12. Süess, Pablo, Rethinking Evangelization among Indigenous Peoples, School of Theology, Sao Bernardo do Campo, Brazil,, 1992
13. Altmann, Walter, Hope and Justice in the Americas, edit by Oscar Bolioli, pp. 162
14. Sepulveda, Juan, Pentecostalism and Popular Religiosity, International Review of Mission, WCC, Geneva, January, 1989
15. Padilla, Rene, Opposite citation, pp. 10 and 11.
16. Shaull, Richard, La opcion de la iglesia por los pobres, Life and Thought, The Biblical University of Latin America, Vol. 15, No.2, pp. 24.
17. Escobar, Manuel, A Missiological Approach to Latin American Protestantism. International Review of Mission, Vol: LXXXVII, No. 345, WCC Publication, pp. 161-163.
18. Escobar, Samuel, Ibid. pp. 172
19. Campbell, Joan Brown, Justice in the Americas, edited by Oscar Bolioli, pp 17
20. Hacia la Koinonia in Faith, Life and Testimony, Fifth World Council of Faith and Constitution, Santiago de la Compostela, WCC Publications, 1993, pp. 24
21. Moltmann, Jurgen, Diologue or Mission: Christianity and the Religions in an Endangered World, 1996
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