The Latin American church has grown exponentially over the last 120 years, and missiologists and Christian sociologists have widely celebrated this growth. However, upon a closer look at the relevant literature about the state of the church in Latin America, much of this growth is unhealthy and largely driven by Neo-Pentecostalism. Moreover, due to a lack of theologically trained leaders and access to theological resources, especially those contextualized to the Latin American situation, the evangelical church in Latin America is weak and vulnerable to aberrant doctrines. As a result, the Latin American church finds itself at a crossroads: will it become a region of biblically healthy churches that can reproduce themselves and more fully engage in the Great Commission on a global scale, or will it continue to devolve into a Neo-Pentecostalized church that propagates heresy throughout Latin America and abroad?
In response to the lack of theological resources and trained leadership in the church in Latin America, the Western evangelical church has a vital role in helping to strengthen the church in Latin America. This paper’s thesis is that to become a region of biblically healthy churches, Latin America needs church-strengthening missionaries who can fulfill the roles and apply the specific skills and competencies of New Testament church-strengthening missionaries such as Timothy and Titus. These missionaries can partner with Latin American churches to help them embrace and teach sound doctrine, identify and refute false doctrine, and organize into biblically healthy local churches that can reproduce themselves throughout Latin America and beyond.
Furthermore, beyond working directly with local churches, a critical role that church-strengthening missionaries must fulfill is providing theological education that is accessible to the vast numbers of poor, uneducated, rural pastors and leaders that make up a majority of Latin America’s evangelical population. Finally, church-strengthening missionaries are also needed to strengthen and grow the number of traditional seminaries aimed at equipping the educated class to become pastors, theologians, and authors who can lead the Latin American evangelical church into a future that is underpinned with biblically sound theological reflection and resources that are contextualized to the Latin American church. This paper contributes to the larger missiological conversation by answering the question of how the Western church can synthesize information about the rapid growth of Christianity in Latin America with the relevant literature about the state of the church in the region and the biblical data from Acts, 1&2 Timothy, and Titus to determine the missionary roles, skills, and competencies needed in Latin America today.