Los evangélicos

This weekend's paper, El Mercurio, included an extended article about the rise of evangelical churches in the wealthiest suburbs of Santiago. It was a fair article, presenting the history and facts and quoting from pastors and members, sometimes at length. It was, however, a little hard to work out just how significant this rise is, as it only quoted statistics about individual denominations or about evangelicals across all social strata. It did say that one of the churches featured has about 40 members and the other 150.

While there were a couple of things that troubled me, in general the people interviewed spoke of the heart of our faith - "el Evangelico de Jesucristo". One pastor explained the love that God has for the rich, just as he does for the poor, and reported that many people who come along to his church said it was the first time they learned about the Gospel ("dicen que por primera vez saben del Evangelio"). Another lady testified that she had been taught to read the Bible and that, through the Gospel, she was able to have a relationship with God ("Ellos me enseñaron a leer la Biblia y que a través del Evangelio, más que de una religión, se podía entablar una relación con Dios.").

This article was much different from the usual perception of evangelicals as "backward people with little intelligence", as one of the article's interviewees put it ("como personas retrógradas ya hasta poco inteligentes"). This sort of thing is probably best typified by this video that I saw on a local news channel in a restaurant one day soon after the last tremor. The people start dancing wildly as the earthquake hits, perhaps thinking that it was the Spirit of God moving in their church. As you will see, this isn't the original version.