Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – Contemporary Paradigms in Urban Mission: A Case Study from Lima, Peru

By Israel Mandujano
September 2009

Introduction
This article intends to present some of the conditioning factors that might have contributed to the current and meaningful membership growth over the last thirty years in one of the evangelical Christian churches in Peru. The Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) in Lima has grown from one congregation in 1973, with a membership of 150, to about thirty-five thousand members in close to one hundred new congregations today.

Knowing the important role of religion in Peru and its obvious impacts on individuals and society, the study of a rather new, non-Catholic church movement is highly relevant in an attempt to understand the role of Christian forms of spirituality in contemporary Latin American societies. The work of the C&MA in Peru was established by Western missionaries in 1925, and became one of the most significant evangelical Christian denominations.

The work in Lima started in the 1960s. This movement, which has resulted in this substantial growth, is unusual within Christian missions. Missiologist Stephen Neill has observed that Latin American church growth “is something potentially different from anything that has been produced by the Christian churches in other parts of the world.”¹ It may also prove to represent a paradigmatic Christian movement, marking the relevance of spirituality issues in Christian church growth.²

Dr. Arnold Cook has asked, What do you call the Lima story? Was it just successful evangelism in a responsive culture? Was it revival? Was it an awakening impacting society? Answer: It was a wonderful, inscrutable, divine complexity of all the above.³

The first pilot congregation in Lima, located in the district of Lince, experienced a growth from about 150 members in 1973 to more than five thousand today. They have seven worship services each Sunday in their current building, and are in the process of building a new church building for three thousand persons. This congregation initiated an innovative program of evangelism in 1973 called Lima al Encuentro con Dios (Lima Encounters God—LED).

LED has since become the administrative structure of evangelism supported by all the C&MA churches in Lima. Partly as a result of this substantial growth, all Western missionaries of the C&MA have now left Peru. The Peruvian C&MA Church is both economically and structurally self-supporting. Thus, in the Peruvian churches of the C&MA, all 213 ministers are now local, making this group of pastors the largest in the C&MA-related Latin American churches.

Hypothesis of Conditioning Factors
In order to identify and understand the church’s contextual and internal factors that might have conditioned the growth, it is necessary to work with some hypothesis. The working hypothesis with regard to the external conditioning factors is that the movement has indeed been negotiating actively with the socio-religious aspects of the Peruvian culture.

Further, this church movement in some respects represents culture-affirmative social patterns and values, and in other respects represents culture-critical and new social patterns and values after being part of the Christian spiritual events in their lives in this movement. The working hypothesis with regard to internal conditioning factors is that the triune God has erupted suddenly through LED and C&MA churches in Lima, making himself and his attributes visible through his acts in the lives of established congregations on an extended family model, where the fellowship with the triune God is the cornerstone in their life patterns and ethos. The new life patterns and ethos have bearings on their relationships to families, friends, and local communities.

Areas Where Internal and External Conditioning Factors Are Interwoven
Andrew Walls writes, “Theology springs out of practical situations; it is therefore occasional and local in character.”⁴ This means that theological investigations need adequate interaction with other sciences such as sociology, anthropology, or history in order to study the local contexts.⁵

Context is a dynamic manifestation of what is going on with people in relationship with God and his divine work among them directly and through the Church. In this way, it becomes possible to see how the backgrounds of people without Christ (the external factors), and Christ through his direct events of love and within his Church (the internal factors) meet together.

Israel Mandujano is Norwegian/Peruvian. He currently serves as an assistant professor at the School of Religion, Education and Intercultural Studies–NLA in Bergen, Norway. He has also ministered at the Bergen International Fellowship. Previously, he was a pastor with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) in a church outside Lima, Peru. Mandujano left Peru to work as a missionary with Operation Mobilization on board the M V Doulos; he then went on to mission work in Spain with the C&MA and International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.