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An excerpt from The Church from Every Tribe and Tongue chapter written by Carlos Sosa Siliezar (pgs. 103-104).
Edited by Gene L. Green and Stephen T. Pardue and K. K. Yeo (Langham Global Library), 2018. Used with permission.
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Although the evangelical church has been present in Latin America for many decades, only recently has its ecclesiology started to develop. René Padilla and Tetsunao Yamamori recognized back in 2003 that “a remarkable deficit in Latin American evangelical theology is that found in the area of ecclesiology.” Padilla, in particular, has proposed an ecclesiology that can nurture holistic mission. In order to articulate such an ecclesiology, Padilla uses the Gospels, mainly the Synoptic Gospels, in their final form. The driving question of his reading of the New Testament seems to be: How does the Gospels’ ecclesiology support the theological concept of holistic mission?
Padilla argues for a holistic ecclesiology that has, at its center, the fulfillment of holistic mission. Only a church that has a holistic ecclesiology is able to make a positive impact in its community and is capable of transforming society. This holistic ecclesiology has four intertwining characteristics.
The first, and fundamental, characteristic is commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord of all. The heart of the New Testament is precisely the confession of Jesus as Lord (1 Cor. 8:4–6). This confession is tied to the Greek version of the Old Testament, where Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, was referred to as “Lord.” This confession also was a protest against the first-century Roman imperial cult with its emphasis on the absolute authority of the Roman emperor. The church, then, that confesses that Jesus is Lord over all will have a mission that concerns all aspects of life: for example, economics, politics, culture, society, art, ecology, and community (1 Cor. 1:2; cf. Acts 9:14, 21; 22:16). Christology, the acknowledgment that Jesus is Lord over all the earth, is the basis of ecclesiology.
The second characteristic of a holistic ecclesiology is discipleship. Following Jesus means a process of transformation (Rom 10:12–15). The disciple is one who follows Jesus’s example and obeys his teachings (Acts 2:42; Rom 6:17; Gal 1:8–9). Jesus taught and showed how to love God love our neighbors, serve others, be in solidarity with the poor, and be committed to the truth (Mark 10:43–45; Luke 14:25–33; John 10:15). The “holistic disciple” should live as Jesus lived. However, discipleship is not a lonely business. The disciple is part of a Christian community where he or she finds God’s grace. Therefore, the third characteristic of a holistic ecclesiology is community. The holistic church is actually a new humanity. Its testimony is incarnational – that is, it becomes real in the world just as God’s Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14; 20:21). The church embodies God’s word and is a witness of God’s purpose for the whole of creation. The paradigm of the church’s mission is Jesus’s life, ministry, death, resurrection, and exaltation (Matt. 10:18, 24–25; Acts 2:36; 1 Cor. 15:25, 56–57; Eph. 1:19–20). |
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An excerpt from The Church from Every Tribe and Tongue chapter written by Carlos Sosa Siliezar (pgs. 103-104).
Edited by Gene L. Green and Stephen T. Pardue and K. K. Yeo (Langham Global Library), 2018. Used with permission.
CARLOS SOSA SILIEZAR (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, Illinois. He holds a PhD in New Testament Language, Literature and Theology from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of Creation Imagery in the Gospel of John (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015) and La condición divina de Jesús: Cristología y creación en el Evangelio de Juan (Salamanca, 2016).
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