It's not as if there were a dearth of religious options out there. They're everywhere! And not all the religious options come in the guise of churches. Take televison, for example. TV's gospel is called the consumer society. Human worth, preaches television, is measured by the
"exclusiveness" of the products that one consumes. Those assured of salvation by this gospel are the young, the beautiful, and the successful. (Don't be surprised if most of them also happen to be white!) Everyone else must scramble to buy a bit of salvation (and identity) by collecting some of the crumbs that fall from this exclusive table: a pair of Nike tennis shoes, a Sony Walkman, Calvin Klein jeans, or whatever the commercial badges of the moment might be.
The pure and undefiled religion of the consumer society is beyond the reach of the great unwashed multitudes. All that it offers to the excluded are carefully measured and mediated dreams and expectations. Television suggests to the excluded concrete ways for dealing with the frustration produced by their exclusion. First, violence. Armchair Rambos frequently live out their TV-generated fantasies by beating up on the women closest to them. Second, sex.
Television tells us that ultimate human meaning can be found in the mechanized, mindless practice of the sexual act. Sex, of course, is closely related to violence in televisionland. Again, women are usually the objects, not the subjects, of the sexual act.
Don't be surprised to find that some of the new religious movements have quite successfully adapted themselves to the gospel of the consumer society. Since Constantine, churches have always had to define themselves in relation to the gospels preached by those in power. Some remain faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ; others go with the flow.
Today, for example, the theologians of the consuming gospel explain that God wants us all to be healthy and wealthy. What about the poor and the sick? Simple! Either they lack faith or are living in sin. But this all- consuming gospel grants them the authority to grab God by the throat and DEMAND material blessing. Your God isn't big enough to give you a new car? Try mine!
The result? The excluded continue to be excluded for having committed the gravest of all sins:
having been excluded in the first place!
Where do we go from here?
Back to that meeting of Latin American pastoralists.
We ended our time together by compiling another laundry list. Why? Its our way of
encouraging you to rethink your pastoral strategies and, if necessary, to provoke you to design strategies that are appropriate to your particular context, strategies that respond to this particular moment in history:
Christian churches have lost our monopoly over the institutionalization of spirituality in Latin America. Every day less of the spirituality experessed by average folks is channeled through the churches. The range of alternatives is enormous: from Umbanda to New Age, from the
consumer gospel to ancient Mayan spirituality. Our churches must abandon our historic
triumphalism and assume our minoirty position with dignity. Furthermore, without abandoning our principles, we must learn to establish relationships of mutual respect with both ancient and new spiritualities that proclaim values not wholly alien to the Reign of God.
Faced with our minority status, historic churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, can no longer afford to dismiss Pentecostals as the enemy. We must learn to be allies.
Our common identity with other Christians grows out of our common faith in Jesus of Nazareth.
This is sufficient. Enough of competition! Enough of numbers! Enough of our self-promoting arrogance! The time has come to set aside our sectarianism and live out the Gospel. Together!
(We always suspected as much. These are the values we have celebrated in the lives of so many of our local saints. "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us." Hebrews12:1).
We urgently need to design pastoral strategies (and even select the times for our meetings and worship services) according to the needs of that great mass of excluded people who form part of non-traditional families: single mothers, families divided by divorce, grandmothers who raise their grandchildren, widows, orphans, street children, etc. We must accept the fact that women are the protagonists in many Latin American families. Women take the initiative in creating and defending family spaces. Women administer the family budget. Women take the initiative in promoting gospel values and celebrating God's presence in the home. At the same time, we need to hold up responsible male role models that break with machismo, insensitivity and violence.
We need to rescue a spirit of celebration and not get lost in rationalism. We need to develop contextualized, coherent and celebrative liturgies, balancing form and content. This will grow out of a permanent conversation between Pentecostal and historic churches. It is not enough to
pentecostalize the liturgies of the historic churches.
Kleptocracies. Narcocracies. "Formal" democracies (that is, governments where the army and the economic elites have retreated to run things from behind the scenes). These are the political systems that dominate the Latin American landscape. How do we move from corrupt,
manipulative and abusive politics to the responsible administration of public resources for the common good? As Christians, we need to articulate an ethic for public servants and a theology of power. As Christians, we need to participate in the decentralization of the functions of the state and strengthen regional and local democratic institutions. When the excluded begin to participate in local boards and commissions, democracy begins to take root.
We are flesh. We are spirit. But we have divorced one from the other. Our human dignity, rooted in our divine parentage, resides in the holistic integration of flesh and spirit. For this reason, aggression against a human being is an aggression against God. But there's more. We also must learn to decipher in our own selves the constant conversation between body and spirit.
And how to we comprehend the closely-related mystery of our sexuality? Or the mystery of our spiritual yearning? Or the enormous impact that these yearnings have on our physical beings?
The principal source of values, dreams and expectations in our world is the communication media, especially television. At this point in history, any serious Christian Education program must include media literacy: criteria and methodologies that facilitate a critical perception of media messages.
Preaching is in crisis. We must train our preachers to preach simple, creative, prophetic, humane, tender, contextualized sermons. ï
Many people slip out the back door of the neo-Pentecostal churches feeling deceived,
defrauded, damaged. But the same thing happens in many historic and Pentecostal churches.
We must humbly ask ourselves if we are prepared to provide caring communities, communities of integrity, for some of the many people who have become fed up with organized religion.
We need to review our theologies in light of our increasingly pluralistic world. What contribution can the Christian faith make to humankind's common reflection on the human condition at this moment in history? In this process, the members of our churches must learn to articulate their own beliefs, not so that they can proselytize more effectively, but so that their living faith becomes a useful tool in building the common good.
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