By Tony Campos
Pastor of Casa de Luz in Sacramento, California
In July 1974, Catharine Padilla gathered her children around a world atlas in their home in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Pointing to Lausanne, Switzerland, she explained that their father was about to give a talk. He would say things some people might not want to hear. She asked the children to pray. Their father, C. René Padilla, was addressing an international gathering of evangelical leaders. The question he brought to them had grown out of years of study and ministry: How could Christians proclaim the Gospel while treating poverty and injustice as secondary concerns?
For Padilla, that question was personal. Born in Ecuador in 1932, he spent his childhood in Ecuador and Colombia. His father worked as a tailor and planted evangelical churches. The family knew economic hardship and religious persecution. As a boy in Bogotá, Colombia, René was struck by stones because of his family’s faith.
He later studied in the United States and England, earning a doctorate in New Testament. But the questions of Latin America continued to shape his work. Serving among university students, he met young people trying to understand faith amid revolutionary movements, inequality, and political conflict. They needed a theology that spoke to the world they inhabited.
At Lausanne, Padilla challenged his audience to examine what they were carrying into other countries along with their Christian message. Were they sharing the Gospel or also exporting their own way of life? What place did care for the poor have in their understanding of the church’s mission?
His vision offered a corrective to influential Western assumptions about mission, particularly the emphasis on individual conversion that left social conditions largely unquestioned. He challenged the identification of Christianity with American prosperity and culture. Christians in Latin America and elsewhere had their own contribution to make: reading Scripture amid poverty and injustice could expose blind spots in the theology they had received from missionaries.
Padilla offered a simple image for the relationship between evangelism and social responsibility: the two wings of an airplane. They belonged together. This understanding became known as misión integral – a mission concerned with people’s spiritual, physical, personal, and social lives. The conviction took shape in ordinary work as well as public speeches. Padilla served as a pastor in Argentina, helped train Christian leaders, and published Latin American authors whose voices deserved to be heard. His international influence grew alongside a continuing commitment to ministry in the region.
Padilla died in 2021 at the age of 88. The image of the two wings remains an accessible introduction to his life’s work. For him, speaking about God’s love and practicing love for one’s neighbor were inseparable parts of following Jesus.
Further Reading
Begin with C. René Padilla’s What Is Integral Mission? (Regnum Books, 2021), a short introduction to his understanding of the church’s calling. For a deeper exploration, read his Mission between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom (revised and expanded edition, Langham, 2010), which examines the connection between proclaiming the Gospel and living out its social implications.