Investing in the Latin American Church

It's not okay with me that 75% of pastors / church leaders in Latin America do not have adequate biblical or theological training. In normal parlance, we would call this a crisis of leadership! While we can rightly celebrate the revival of the evangelical church in Latin America in the last 40 years, the growth of well-trained leaders has not kept pace.  

Gustavo and Rochelle Karakey

The results of this dearth of theological preparation have been alarming for the Latin American church:  cultural evangelicalism, superficial exegesis, cultural hermeneutics and preaching, shallow discipleship, a stifling legalism, a proliferation of anti-biblical (sometimes syncretistic) practices and a host of heretical movements.  Thus, in Latin America, we have fallen short of the only imperative within the Great Commission, which is to "make disciples" teaching them to obey everything the Lord commanded.

Latin American Christianity is at an historic crossroads.  To reach its full potential, it must develop its own scholars, professors, textbooks and theologies to critically engage with the problems native to its own soil and culture.  This can only occur with a generous transfer of intellectual capital and theological resources, both of which the North American Church has in great abundance. Additionally, Latin America is experiencing a historic continent wide missions movement to other parts of the world, particularly the 10-40 Window and the Muslim world.

The training, mobilization, and sending of missionaries from Latin America represents one of the most important missiological opportunities of our day. Here, once again, the North American church is uniquely poised to play a critical and historic role in the development, training and mobilization of the Latin American churches for the global missions endeavor.

In an era of missionary enterprises, which has often produced an unhealthy financial dependency vis-à-vis the majority world church, the sharing of our intellectual resources with the majority world church carries no such burdens.  It's not OK with me that 75% of pastors / church leaders in Latin America do not have adequate biblical or theological training.  We as the North American church have an opportunity to make a dramatic change in this statistic, and with it, the potential to impact the culture and the institutions of Latin American Christianity.

Gustavo is a LAM missionary teaching at the Bible Seminary of Medellin [http://www.karakey.com/]