In her book Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims, the journalist Adriana Carranca traces the rise of evangelical Christianity in parts of the developing world, and the growth of missionaries from these regions that followed. Though an overwhelming majority of Latin America was already Christian by the early twentieth century—a result of Spanish and Portuguese colonization—they were largely Catholic. Revivalist American evangelicals believed that true Christians had to be “born again,” so they considered the region to be a legitimate, and susceptible, mission field.
Pentecostalism, a small charismatic sect, quickly expanded in the US by helping foster, as Carranca puts it, “a sense of spiritual equality and unity” among congregants of diverse class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. It did the same in Latin America. The Pentecostal missionaries also “legitimated existing indigenous spiritual practices, promises of healing, and testimonies of a life-transforming faith,” Carranca explains, propelling its rise. Today it is the fastest-growing religious sect in the world.
Of course, newly converted Protestants in the Global South did not always agree with the ideologies and priorities of their brethren in the North. To many Christian leaders in Latin America, US evangelism smelled of imperialism: it was devoid of principles of social and political justice, and it “reduced religion into a marketed product and viewed converts merely as numbers.” The division came to a head at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, with attendees representing 150 countries and 135 Protestant denominations. As Carranca explains, one Peruvian speaker warned the audience “that many of the countries that had succumbed to violent Marxist revolutions were those where Christianity had allowed itself to be identified with the ruling class.” American evangelical missions were criticized for being driven primarily by numbers, underscoring what Christianity Today described as the division between the “data-oriented church growth school and the discipleship-demanding compassion and justice group.” By the end of the conference, a lukewarm consensus had been achieved, and—as tends to happen at conventions—meaningless phrasing was added to the final documents of the Lausanne Covenant. The two camps agreed to affirm that “evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty.”