The following is part of a dialogue that took place in Managua between the North American delegation and a group of indigenous evangelical pastors from the Nicaraguan countryside. The conversation focused on the impact of the revolution on evangelical faith in Nicaragua.
--The Editors
Alvino Melendez (Baptist Church): We have been challenged by the revolution to go deeper in our concept of salvation. From a theological viewpoint, there is no salvation of the soul, but of the person. We don't speak now only of the spirit.
Rodolfo Fonseca (Church of God): Before the revolution, our preaching was directed more toward the spiritual. That is still the principal aspect, but we weren't preaching an integral gospel according to Scripture. Luke 4:16 teaches us that salvation is not only spiritual, but liberates the person from the many things that society makes him captive to.
Gustavo Parajon (CEPAD): In the perspective of Ephesians, chapter four, Paul speaks of the growth of the Christian. After we initiate our travel with the Lord, our journey, we are perfected by Jesus Christ to the fullness of the stature of Jesus Christ. Sometimes as evangelicals all we preach is the new birth, and then we leave dwarfs; there is no growth, building up of the body of Christ. And then these dwarf Christians cannot do the ministry that Ephesians four teaches.
Thelma Pereira (Waves of Light radio station): I understand that the Christian is saved from the moment of belief in Jesus Christ as Lord. The process of spiritual growth comes later, but salvation is only by grace.
You have asked how we feel about the revolution as evangelicals. I would say God permits different situations for growth. This is what has happened in Nicaragua.
Since the triumph of the revolution, the churches have grown. The word has been preached more. This doesn't mean that Christ has changed; he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. But we evangelicals in Nicaragua are now concerned for humanity. As Christians we must be concerned about progress not only in salvation of the soul but also in the integral advance of the human community.
We thank God for our salvation and for our current situation. We had salvation before, but this new situation has stimulated deepening and growth and enrichment.
Antonio Videa (Assemblies of God): The new focus of many of the evangelical communities is the formation of the "new man." The gospel that we have had says that the new man doesn't drink whiskey, doesn't smoke, doesn't have two women, and doesn't steal. But we can take away his vices and he will be the same old man with selfish ideas. He could have an employee or a maid whom he treats as an object. If he has a sale, what he wants is to get as much money as possible, but not to be serving the community.
Let's say a thief is converted, and all we offer him is heaven--and if he steals again he goes to hell--but we don't provide him any medium for rising above his level of human effort prior to his conversion. How are we really encouraging the growth of the new man in Christ in those terms?
This revolution, as soon as it triumphed, began a program of literacy. It covered all the mountains of Nicaragua, and all of the departments, creating work, preparing people to further their lives and earn a living. I think this is evangelical. So we evangelicals have to learn to live as new humanity in Christ. The revolution challenges us to that.
Before we felt we couldn't participate in the revolution because of this fantasy of the communist menace, ghosts; now we feel free to testify with greater amplitude.
Magazines came from the United States during the Alliance for Progress--suitcases full of magazines for us: Reader's Digest, Life, and a string of others, even religious magazines that still continue to present this ghost. The religious magazines that arrive haven't advanced beyond what we were getting before the revolution.
The ghost of communism has been among us many years and still runs around loose. They told us that Fidel Castro is a type of anti-Christ, that government leaders are totally hostile enemies of Christianity, that the family will disappear under communism.
Ron Sider (Evangelicals for Social Action): In some parts of the world, in some churches, there seems to be no distinction between two things that I think are not the same: one is the leading of persons into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,that lasts forever; the other is working for justice. I think that the Bible calls us strongly to both of these things. If I understood what you were saying, there's a much greater concern for social justice since the revolution. Have the opportunities for an individual relationship with Christ grown since the revolution?
Fonseca: We have the parable of the good Samaritan. There's a man in need; he's been attacked and robbed, wounded, he's bleeding, his life is ebbing away, and the religious man in a hurry doesn't attend to him.
As Christians we were surrounded by wounded people, assaulted people, injured people. It was not the revolution that taught us social responsibility, it was the Bible. But what the revolution is doing for the poor makes us discover that that's in the Bible.
So how are we Christians to be preaching only the spiritual gospel, leaving to the so-called Marxists and atheists what we are supposed to be doing? That spiritualized Christianity is what our missionaries with blue eyes and beautiful hair and a fragrance of heaven taught us. If we preach only that, what will happen? Then those who are helping the poor show themselves to be more Christian than we who claim to be Christians.
So the context we live in obliges us to reflect and go back to the Bible and reread it, maintaining always that the primary thing is the salvation of the soul, the spiritual part, but that it is inseparable from the ethics.
Nicanor Mareina: You ask how the revolution has helped us? We could say, lots. Materially, it's provided work. On the other hand, it has challenged us to do the Lord's work in an integral form for the total person. You as North Americans, I believe, can consider the culture and economic development that we have here in relationship to your own. I was educated under North Americans who prohibited us from participating in the politics of our own country. I accepted that, I was formed in that mold.
In the three years of the revolution, I've become aware that things are the opposite of what I was taught. For example, to think that only the soul can be saved is the North American mentality, because North Americans don't have the needs that we have.
Materially, as North Americans, you don't suffer lack or want, so your main necessity is of the soul. And that culture was transmitted to us, forgetting our necessity as Latin Americans.
I understand, in the first place, the necessity for souls to be saved. But in the second place, my body must be saved from illness, malnutrition, illiteracy, so that the person, the body, can be improved, and better serve the Lord. We Nicaraguans have a proverb that says, "Full belly, happy heart." The believer with an empty stomach, undernourished, how can he serve the Lord better?
Consider your situation and ours in a spiritual sense and a material sense. When we talk about salvation, think of someone drowning. If we rescue him from the water, don't we save him? What do we save? The body or the soul? Previously, we'd let him drown, and it's one more soul for the Lord. So you have to see the point of view from which we believe, live our faith, and understand salvation.
My church is a very small church. I have been there as pastor for a little over a year. Through the efforts of our work, exhausting to be sure, the church has grown about 100 per cent. Why? Because we've helped not only the soul, but the physical and material needs of our people.
Jim Wallis (Sojourners): You mentioned that we need to understand our North American situation in light of the Nicaraguan situation. I think that is very important, because it is not the case that everyone in the United States is comfortable and well fed and has their material needs taken care of. Some of our churches are in areas where people are very poor. Too often the evangelical churches of the United States have preached the same gospel to the poor there as they have here.
It's important that we understand theologically that such a gospel is not a coincidence, but serves the interests of those who are in power. The church in the United States often has been like the church in Nicaragua under Somoza, serving the interests of the wealthy and the powerful, not the needs of the poor.
So this theological conversation helps to explain the political relationship between the United States and Central America.
There is a new American church emerging in our country, doing the same theological reflection there that you are doing here. Luke 4:16 is also a key scripture for us. Many of us feel strong solidarity with your reflection.
Mareina: When we say there's no lack in the United States, I'm speaking psychologically. Even though the people live in poverty, psychologically the situation is different. Here in Nicaragua people lived in the time of Somoza, in the very worst of circumstances, and now they are offered a chance to escape from that misery and they don't want to. It's an oppressed mentality, a psychological problem. So what we're striving for is to lift people out of that kind of a mental state of resignation, but they reject this because they say that's communist.
Unidentified Pastor: The categories of spiritual and material we are finding very, very difficult to separate. We are very interested in knowing why the relationship is of such intense concern to you. What historical distortion lies behind that? This separation was something that was imposed on the mission field; it's an imported issue. It is a battle being fought in other places, but not here.
Sider: I think part of the problem is that some Christians today want to be concerned only with justice, and so they learn to speak in a way that confuses us. That's just as bad, I think, as what most evangelicals have done in the last decade, which is to largely ignore social justice. Do you see a distinction between those two things?
Unidentified Pastor: Of course, we do see a distinction. We preach the gospel, we proclaim the gospel. The evangelical churches haven't ceased for a moment to carry out this ministry.
I'd like to say that I am very grateful to the Central American mission, the first to bring the gospel here to Nicaragua. A missionary came very young to this country and recently returned to the United States an elderly woman, after giving most of her life to the work of the Lord in this place. I've been a Christian for 20 years, since that moment when I surrendered myself, body, soul, and spirit to the Lord, because I was taught that was what we must do.
I'm also aware that only Christ in the heart of the people can realize the changes we need. I want to say one thing again: I give thanks to the Lord for the situation that has happened here in this nation so that every day more people come to the knowledge of the truth and the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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