René Padilla
Evangelical theologian born in Ecuador, who worked among students from Buenos Aires. His paper at the Lausanne congress of 1974 criticised the identification of the Gospel with North American culture and argued that repentance has a social dimension.
In 1974 Padilla was associate general secretary for Latin America of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, with headquarters in Buenos Aires (Padilla, Evangelism and the World, p. 116). His paper at the congress at Lausanne, “Evangelism and the World”, criticised what he called “culture Christianity”, above all the identification of the Gospel with the “American Way of Life” (Padilla, Evangelism and the World, pp. 125–126), and argued that repentance has a social dimension and that evangelism is not a call to social quietism (Padilla, Evangelism and the World, pp. 128–129). John Stott cites the paper in his commentary on the covenant’s section on culture (Stott, The Lausanne Covenant: An Exposition and Commentary, commentary on section 10). See the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization.
The relief agency Tearfund, whose international president he was from 1998 to 2010, records that he was born in Ecuador and announced his death, at the age of 88, on 29 April 2021 (Tearfund, press release on the death of René Padilla (29 April 2021), paragraphs 1–3).
In the timeline
- 16–25 July 1974, firm dateThe Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization
In July 1974 some 2,700 evangelical Christians from more than 150 nations meet at Lausanne. Their covenant, drafted under John Stott, commits them to world evangelization and affirms that evangelism and social responsibility are both Christian duties.