P
pablope
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This should explain it…the personal true story of a couple who went on a mission and tried and implemented in their work…this details their experience…freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1858224/posts
How I solved the Catholic problem!
Segregation was only one of the problems I observed with the imported evangelicalism of Guatemala. A bigger problem is the disease of dissension, which is endemic to protestantism. When the Baptists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Fundamentalists, and the other well-meaning missionaries came to Guatemala, they brought with them all the doctrinal spats that American churches split over. Guatemalan churches, like their American counterparts, are constantly in a state of strife and doctrinal turmoil, splitting into new churches. New denominations spring up in Guatemala at a breathtaking rate. Pastors, (often self-proclaimed, with little or no education) found new churches, taking large portions of their former congregations with them.
In one little Evangelical church the leaders decided to get hymnals (at great expense to the members) and tone down the music on Sundays, so the neighbors wouldn’t think they were Pentecostals. Some members left because they didn’t want to give up swaying and hand-clapping during worship.
Another church split over the election of a female elder. Splinter groups split from splinter groups which had split from other splinter groups. The church was “multiplying,” all right.
But when I came to Guatemala, living in a country of high illiteracy, I was forced to ask the following question for the first time in my life:
“If a person’s knowledge of truth depends to a great measure upon his ability to read and understand and use Scripture, and if that person’s growth in Christ depends upon his being able to do the same, what about the illiterate?”
This realization was earth-shaking. I saw that evangelicalism had become, by its “Bible alone” principle, a religion of the literate elite. As a missionary taking the gospel to illiterate people, I realized I had to be absolutely sure, before God, that what I was telling them was, in fact, the Christian Faith, free from error. It had to be 100 percent Truth with a capital T. The problem was, using the “Bible alone” principle I had been taught, I had no way to be absolutely sure.
I witnessed among Guatemalan Evangelicals a cacophony of conflicting teachings. Pentecostal television preachers railed against the devil and cast out demons right and left. Fundamentalist non-Pentecostal preachers were just as busy railing against the Pentecostals for speaking in tongues, which was, they warned, a sure sign that they were in cahoots with the devil.
Some preachers were teaching a “health and wealth gospel” in one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nations. Many preached American-style democracy as the “biblical” government God wanted to see in Guatemala. Baptists preached that infant baptism didn’t count and that those who practice it aren’t “true Christians.” Lutheran missionaries were busy baptizing babies. Quakers told people they didn’t need any outward symbols of Christianity.
Every Evangelical preacher waved his Bible around, claiming it as his authority. “The Bible says . . .” is perhaps the most common phrase heard on the radio in Guatemala these days.
With all the competing voices, how was one to know who was right? What mere man could stand up with a clear conscience before a group of illiterate people and say, “This is what the Bible means?” The sheer arrogance of what was going on made it difficult for me to listen to sermons after a while. All of them were “preaching the gospel.” But whose gospel? I wondered. Around that time, a more fundamental question loomed: What is the gospel?
I remember hearing one day how a Methodist missionary on one side of the mountain made a deal with the Pentecostal missionary on the other side saying, “I won’t tell your people they need to baptize their babies if you won’t tell mine that they need to speak in tongues.”
The more I thought about this, the scarier my conclusions became, because the bottom line for me and for every other individual Protestant Christian was this: Theology for the modern Evangelical is a matter of his own opinion about what Scripture means.
The most astonishing discovery came when it dawned on me through long hours of reading and studying Scripture and conservative Evangelical commentaries on biblical sufficiency that Scripture doesn’t even teach that it alone is sufficient for knowing all Truth about the Faith. Protestants presuppose sola scriptura, without giving the slightest thought to the possibility that the “Bible alone” is an incorrect view. If that presupposition were erroneous, I reasoned, then everything which was built upon it would be dubious as well.
And finally, the Protestant notion of sola scriptura (the Bible alone) fell apart each time I tried to test it. I began to see that Evangelicalism’s insistence on going by the Bible alone led continually into division and problems. Worse yet, claiming to go by the Bible alone didn’t really provide any certitude of belief for believers.
