BOOK REVIEW: Baptists shape church leaders of third millennium, author says

Posted: 2/17/06

BOOK REVIEW: Baptists shape church
leaders of third millennium, author says

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

FORT WORTH—As Christianity’s center of gravity shifts to the Southern Hemisphere, Baptists and likeminded evangelicals stand on the threshold of tremendous opportunity, said retired missions professor Justice Anderson.

Although Catholics have enjoyed established status in Latin America and Pentecostals groups have experienced explosive growth there, Baptists occupy “the golden mean between Roman Catho-licism and Pentecostal extremes,” said Anderson, who served as a missionary-professor 16 years at the International Baptist Seminary in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and 26 years as professor of missiology at South-western Baptist Theo-logical Seminary.

Latin American Baptists—and other evangelicals who share baptistic be-liefs—can expect to assume increasing influence on global Christianity, since Third World Christians account for 60 percent of the total Christian population and evangelicalism is the dominant force in global Christianity, he noted.

“Without doubt, the leadership of Christianity, in the third millennium of its history, will be found in the South,” Anderson concluded.

That means Christians in the Northern Hemisphere must learn to “take a servant’s role” alongside—and often under the direction—of Christians in the South, he insisted.

Baptists’ role in shaping these Christian leaders for the third millennium reaches beyond those who call themselves “Baptist,” Anderson asserted.

Baptists’ emphasis on the Bible also has helped both Roman Catholicism and the Pentecostal and charismatic groups in Latin America “come to a strong evangelical center,” he said.

“There’s a greater Catholic interest in individual Bible study, and the Catholic Church is seeing the impact of Bible study being done by all the people and not just the priests,” he said. “Baptists have helped Pentecostals come to a more wholesome understanding of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit that is based not just on experience but grounded in Scripture.”

But any discussion of Baptists and their impact on Latin America has to include the larger evangelical community, Anderson discovered as he set out to write a history of Baptists in Latin America.

“It is impossible to extract Latin American Baptists from the evangelical context from which they sprang,” he wrote in An Evangelical Saga: Baptists and their Precursors in Latin America.

Early Protestant missionaries to Latin America came largely from the Free Church tradition—including Moravians and Anabaptists. And even Anglicans, Lutherans and Reformed Christians discovered they essentially had to operate as free churches in countries where Roman Catholicism was the established church, he noted.

“This hodge-podge of Protestant pioneers gradually jelled into what I call ‘an evangelical community’—a Protestant movement—from which structured denominations gradually evolved. … However, these new denominations refused to isolate themselves from their larger ‘evangelical community’ in which they developed,” he wrote.

Baptists grew in Latin America because of both “providential” and “intentional” precursors—evangelical missionaries from varied denominational backgrounds, Anderson concluded.

“Many of these had no desire to be Baptists, and certainly did not intentionally promote the growth of a Baptist denomination,” he wrote. “But being faithful to the propagation and defense of … evangelical principles …, they prepared the soil for an emerging Baptist denomination.”

In addition to highlighting groups and individuals who paved the way for Baptist work in Latin America, Anderson’s 637-page history published by Xulon Press includes country-by-country histories of Baptists throughout the region.

Much of the book is an English translation and updating of volumes he originally wrote in Spanish.

Anderson committed himself to the extensive task of reworking and expanding his manuscript partly because he felt Latin American Baptists received inadequate attention in most English church history books, and partly because he wanted Hispanic Baptists in the United States to understand their heritage.

“Hispanic Baptists should not see themselves as an appendage to our (Anglo) heritage,” he stressed. “They have a history and heritage of their own. And it’s an exciting story.”