- People feel like they have to choose between being a student/professional worker and being a Christian - so they decide that Christianity will have to fit in with the rest of their life. Church attendence is seen as optional.
- People don't know about the storyline or major ideas of the Bible.
They don't know where they fit in with it all. This is true even for
people who have been Christians for many years.
- People know that they should do 'devotionals', but no-one tells them what exactly they're supposed to do.
- Many Christians have only been Christians for five years and haven't seen any good models of how to live as a Christian.
- Australians could learn from the Chilean practice of including a Bible verse for every occasion. Unfortunately, these nice-sounding verses have often been completely taken out of context and misapplied.
- People are accustomed to passively receiving from missionaries. They think that missionaries are unattainably perfect and don't realise that they need friends and have stuff to learn. They don't realise that they could send Chilean missionaries to other countries.
- The excellent Bible college, Centro de Estudios Pastorales, has only been around for a few years.
A big thanks to my new-found Chilean friends (and missionaries) for teaching me so much!
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Interesting...
Do the Chilean Christians consider that they could do the work the missionaries do in Chile? / Be missionaries to other parts of Chile?
I don't know Fiona - you'd have to ask them! My guess is that the answer would be yes and no - cos missionary stuff isn't an exact science. As you can see from the rest of the blog post, there's a big need for foreign missionaries to come to Chile to give the people (esp the pastors) good teaching and training, so they can mature in their understanding and faith.
But that doesn't mean that there's *no* Chileans who could go and do a good job of missionary work. There *are* some gifted and well-trained leaders who are currently doing great stuff in their hometowns and who could certainly do that elsewhere.
There's also room for less-mature/trained Chileans to go and live somewhere else and just tell people the simple Gospel message. In a sense even a brand new Christian could be a missionary!
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