Protestantism in Migration: Ecclesia Semper Migranda

Abstract

The very word “Protestantism” brings with it cognitive dissonance for many Protestants across the world, who often prefer to describe themselves using other terms. In the Spanish-speaking world, for example, Christians across the confessional and denominational spectrum who are neither Roman Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox refer to themselves most often not as Protestants, but as evangélicos and evangélicas (which does not necessarily mean “evangelical” in the English-language sense). As Argentine Methodist theologian José Míguez Bonino puts it, “I have been catalogued variously as conservative, revolutionary, Barthian, liberal, catholicizing, moderate, liberationist. Probably all of it is true … But if I try to define myself in my most intimate being, what ‘comes out’ from my heart is that I am evangélico.”¹ By contrast, protestante has often been used as a derogatory term. To make matters even more confusing, many Protestants all over the world belong to groups that do not trace their historical origins directly back to the European Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, though in indirect ways they have all been touched by that movement, so that it truly can be said that they have a Protestant genealogy. Rather than a single Protestant family tree, perhaps one should speak of a variety of “Protestant trees” with a somewhat similar genus, though growing on many different soils and in all sorts of climates.