October 1999

Dear Friends,

As Linnis says, we came back to a Brazil that had taken some blows during the year we were gone. The first thing I saw was positive, the face of a faculty colleague from the seminary. The second thing was not so positive: the public telephone canopies known as "big ears" were painted a different color and sported a different name. What used to be the São Paulo Telephone Company is now, thanks to privatization, the subsidiary of a European company, and there have been complaints about the service. Privatization here has tended to mean that Brazil is being sold to foreigners.

There was good news about my Brazilian church—the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil. After several years during which my seminary was "out" in church politics, the director of the seminary, an African-Brazilian, has been elected to a four-year term as moderator of the church! This is going to be the quadrennium of theological education. The new moderator wrote a master's thesis several years ago about the Child Evangelism Fellowship, which has had quite an impact in Brazil. Now that he is moderator, his thesis
has been published as a book. He thinks Christian education should have a liberating pedagogy, and that is not what one finds in the organization that he studied. In this and in other ways, our moderator is carrying on a prophetic ministry.

There is other news that we hope is good. The Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) is offering accreditation to theological seminaries. Theological seminaries have had accreditation for some time in the United States, but Brazil has had a secularizing tendency ever since the proclamation of the Republic in1889. Now a seminary education will count as a "real" education when a minister/tentmaker applies for a job, but the accreditation process is going to be long and complicated. Pray for us, as a part of the interface between church and state gets renegotiated in Brazil.

At the São Paulo Seminary of my Brazilian church, I stepped back into my old slot, teaching introduction to New Testament and New Testament exegesis. Exegesis (the close study of a single passage of Scripture) is a struggle, as the students at an undergraduate night school do their best at a task which is hard for students at Harvard, too.

At the Methodist University, I resumed my work in the Graduate Religious Studies Program. There, too, I found changes, as the university is under a new administration and we are subject to a lot of new rules. We have a lot of experience there with master's degrees; now my new challenge is in working with doctoral students. I am now writing something about this experience to send later to the Web site.

I am Parish Associate (our terminology, not Brazil's) at a very young church on the periphery of São Paulo, the Independent Presbyterian Church of Parque Ipe. This is really the city's growing edge, so much so that you have to drive down a muddy country lane to get to where some of the church members live. An established church had sent a couple of middle class families out there to
evangelize the poor, and (simplifying the story) a church was born, with those middle class families providing three of the four elders.

Many of the members live in a favela ("shantytown") and others live in an intentional squatter settlement, a sort of "urban landless movement," which is said to have Protestants among its leaders. (This sort of thing is more associated with the progressive wing of the Catholic Church, but Brazil is changing.) One elder, Presbítero Abner, is a sort of bridge between the world of the other elders and the world of the church members. Having been a Presbyterian elder for years, but not a middle class professional, he recently moved into the area and built a modest house for himself and his family. He visits indefatigably (and wouldn't mind if the minister did it too!), not only
in homes but also in the local jail. At a church service, half the people present may be children. Last March this church advanced in status from NCD ("congregação") to being an organized church with a pastor.

Other bad news from Brazil: unemployment is up, violence in the streets is up, the city government in São Paulo is one big scandal, there have been repeated massive escapes from the juvinile detentions center (FEBEM), the city's badly needed fleet of buses is not only privatized but faced with adverse public policy, one of the states in the Amazonian region seems to be under the control of the same type of drug organization that has affected Colombia. Are we moving, someone asked, from kleptocracy to narcocracy? Brazil's relation with the International Monetary Fund seems to be in the daily news.

I believe that God is present where people are doing things. Perhaps one should start with the converse: People are doing things where God is present. But who will do something about the world order that seems to be imposing all the worst consequences of the country's indebtedness, in a variety of ways? Who?

Yours in Christ,

Arch Woodruff