Brazilian Evangelicals Are Split on Lausanne’s Legacy

For years, integral mission—a theological vision that saw evangelism and social justice as inseparable components of Christian life, or as “two wings of an airplane,” as Ecuadorian theologian René Padilla once wrote—has been a legacy of the Lausanne Movement in Brazil. The concept was developed in the 1970s by members of the Latin American Theological Fellowship and motivated Brazilian evangelicals to fight street violence in Rio, battle alcohol abuse in indigenous reserves, and deliver homeless people from drug addiction, among many other achievements.

Recently, however, the legacy of integral mission theology (IMT) has come under scrutiny in Brazil, for generational, demographic, and theological reasons.

In June, the Lausanne movement held a conference in São Paulo to present its Great Commission report, an exhaustive survey of trends affecting global missions efforts. Leading up to the event, evangelicals debated on social media whether the event would become a kind of “funeral for IMT.”

Most of the speakers were young and had joined the movement only in recent years. And no one mentioned “integral mission” from the main stage.

This reality did not escape the observations of longtime Lausanne leaders, who were focused on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the inaugural conference, which will be held next week in Incheon, South Korea.

“Some of us are going to Lausanne 4 with this question in mind: what will become of integral mission?” said Valdir Steuernagel, one of the most prominent Brazilian names in evangelicalism and a senior executive advisor of the Lausanne Movement.

Though the controversy over this concept may have reached fever pitch in Brazil, it goes back decades.

When integral mission was initially conceived in the 1970s, emerging from the first Lausanne congress in 1974, some evangelicals expressed concern about the implications of a gospel that addressed people’s material as well as their spiritual needs. Lausanne-friendly evangelicals were often accused of being influenced by Marxist thought or merely adopting a Protestant version of liberation theology.

These criticisms have persisted over time. In a 2015 video, Reverend Augustus Nicodemus, a former high-ranking leader in the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, described integral mission as “a corrupted or, at the very least, incomplete reading of reality.” Eventually, division over integral mission arose within the national Lausanne network as well.

Increasing tribalism within domestic Brazilian politics has intensified the conflicts.

In April 2018, pastor Ariovaldo Ramos attended a political rally at which he prayed for Brazil’s embattled president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Shortly after that, the left-wing leader was sent to jail on corruption charges.

That same day, Yago Martins, an influential YouTuber and podcaster in the field of theology, lamented Ramos’s presence at the event on Facebook, using the situation to criticize integral mission. In his words, it was “nothing more than Marxist missiology and theological leftism.”

Eighteen months later, Lula was freed, and he regained the presidency in the 2022 elections. The impact of Ramos’s presence at that 2018 event, however, continues to reverberate in the Brazilian church and in the Lausanne Movement.

Ramos—a former president of World Vision in Brazil and founder of the Frente de Evangélicos pelo Estado de Direito (Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law), which describes itself as a Christian movement promoting social justice and human rights—had long been one of the main Brazilian faces of integral mission in Brazil. In the eyes of the opponents of integral mission, Ramos’s support for Lula was seen as evidence that it was a left-wing political movement, an assertion that Ramos rejects.

“The theology of integral mission has no partisan commitment under any circumstances,” he said. “When I went to that rally, I did so out of my convictions as a citizen. And when I visited Lula in prison, I did it because I was invited to a pastoral visit. No pastor can deny a visit to someone who is in prison.”

In the following years, political polarization worsened among evangelicals, exacerbated by the contentious 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Critics on the right observed champions of integral mission conspicuously defending a president (Lula) who had allegedly broken the law. Those on the left asked why evangelicals were supporting a candidate (Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018) whom they viewed as making misogynistic and prejudiced remarks.

“It has been a very hard season. It has left wounds that are still open,” said the leader of one Christian social services organization, who asked not to be identified so as not to impede his group’s ability to collaborate with other ministries. “People who are admired and respected, including theologians and missiologists, started avoiding each other and even exchanged insults due to different political views.”

This polarization has had notable consequences.

“Today, few preachers use the term ‘integral mission.’ They may even address the topic, but they do not use these words so as not to be canceled, labeled, or excluded,” said Ramos.

Though Lausanne Brazil’s integral mission task force still exists and the national Lausanne network has not suffered any high-profile resignations, Ziel Machado, who attended Lausanne’s second global gathering in Manila in 1989 and currently serves as vice-chancellor of the Servo de Cristo Seminary in São Paulo, acknowledges that Brazil’s divisive political situation has undermined a community once characterized by cooperation and fellowship.

“The term ‘integral mission’is tarnished and is now part of the conflict,” he said. “Lausanne teaches us to think about reconciliation. But we can’t apply this principle if we don’t address our problems. We need to understand which areas are affected and what reconciliation needs to be made.”

About a year ago, Lausanne’s Latin America director, Daniel Bianchi, asked whether it was time to retire the phrase. “At this time it is necessary to recognize that the term ‘integral mission’ has become a kind of buzzword and has been used for many things to the point of almost losing its meaning,” wrote Bianchi, from Argentina, who assumed his role with Lausanne in 2017.

Fernando Costa, coordinator of the Lausanne Brazil executive committee and executive director of the Centro Evangélico de Missões, said that integral mission has weakened after the death of many of its pioneers, such as Padilla and Puerto Rican Orlando Costas. “This has become something of a dirty word. Anything that is not very healthy for the church is labeled as integral mission,” said Costa. “It’s unfair to integral mission, but no one will put their face forward to defend it.”

These tensions around the idea of integral mission and within Lausanne have occurred simultaneously with the explosive growth of evangelicals in the country. According to the 1970 census, Brazil had 4.8 million evangelicals, representing 5.2 percent of the population. Today, there are 3.5 million evangelicals just in São Paulo, the country’s most populous city. Overall, 63 million Brazilians, or 31 percent of the total population, are evangelicals, according to a Datafolha survey.

Most of these are converts—only 7 percent of the evangelicals indicated to Datafolha that they had attended church since birth. In contrast to the evangelicals of the 1970s, these newcomers are joining a movement that enjoys increasing influence in pop culture and politics.

Many of these new converts are Pentecostals (in Brazil and Latin America, Pentecostals and independent Christians are counted among evangelicals), who represent about 65 percent of evangelicals in the country. These groups have been underrepresented in the Lausanne Movement, in part because in the past they didn’t have their own seminaries or colleges, instead relying on less formal frameworks to train their pastors and missionaries or using institutions operated by other groups, such as Baptists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans. This lack of scholars has in turn meant that Pentecostal positions on theology and missiology have been less visible.

Indeed, Brazil’s largest evangelical denomination, the Assemblies of God, was, until a few years ago, averse to theological scholarship and resistant to academic environments. More recently, many Assemblies of God members have sought theological training. “This has brought them closer to groups like Lausanne,” said Marcos Amado, who led the Lausanne Movement in Latin America from 2011 to 2013. But it has also created the challenge of integrating a different type of theological tradition into a cooperative environment.

Many Pentecostals attended Lausanne’s June Great Commission event. “What I saw was a young crowd very eager to serve Jesus. They have plans. They want to be an influence through social media and spread [the gospel] to as many people as possible,” said Amado.

Costa said that many leaders who are heavily involved in missionary work had limited knowledge of Lausanne’s history. “We are working with these individuals who are shaping the Brazilian missionary movement, to bring them closer to the theoretical and theological understanding of mission,” he explained. “They are discovering the identity of Lausanne along the way.” To do this, they rely on the mentorship of a group of experienced missiologists who have partnered with Lausanne for decades—older and more experienced participants like Valdir Steuernagel, who attended Lausanne’s 1989 global event at Manila.

But is there any chance of restoring the image of integral mission, in Lausanne Brazil or elsewhere?

“The injury that the theology of integral mission has suffered will be healed only if there is repentance. It may come,” said Ramos. “I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to convict people of sin, righteousness, and judgment.”

For Steuernagel, this conflict is part of the Lausanne Movement’s maturation process: “There is always tension in these meetings. If you take away the tension, I think you also kill the spirit of Lausanne.”

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