Latin America and Missions on the Web

by A. Scott Moreau and Mike O’Rear

With the missions rush into the former Soviet Union a decade ago, followed by the focus on the 10/40 Window, Latin America seems to have been overlooked in recent missions excitement. It’s almost as though missions have a “been there, done that” attitude.

With the missions rush into the former Soviet Union a decade ago, followed by the focus on the 10/40 Window, Latin America seems to have been overlooked in recent missions excitement. It’s almost as though missions have a “been there, done that” attitude.

But the Spirit of God has obviously been blowing a strong wind of missions fervor and commitment across this vibrant region. In a recent article in World Pulse, Kenneth MacHarg of Latin America Mission notes that “missionary leaders are calling for a new look at and renewed focus on Latin America (2003).” He goes on to say, “Christian workers cite the unfinished task in the region, the pressing social and spiritual needs in Latin America and the growing role of Latin Americans in the evangelization of other regions, including people in the 10-40 Window, as more than sufficient justification for continuing ministry in the region.”

We decided to explore what we could find relating to Latin America and missions in this installment of Missions on the Web, having previously developed Asian and African pages for MisLinks (www.mislinks. org). Not surprisingly, we discovered far more sites than space will allow us to describe, many of which are in English. We’ll take you on a guided tour of some we find to be the most important, and offer you direct access to them and others via our Latin America page on MisLinks.

CHRISTIANITY AND MINISTRY SITES
You can find valuable information on the Web today about Christianity in Latin America (especially about evangelicals and Roman Catholics) as well as information on Christian missions and other religions.

COMIBAM is a leading evangelical cooperative missions effort and their site is a great place to start. It includes a project to identify and profile all unreached people groups in Latin America and the Iberian peninsula. It also offers continental missions statistics, graphs, PowerPoint presentations and information on individual countries, as well as books and videos available. They also offer a COMIBAM CD-ROM.

The COMIBAM site also provides a comprehensive directory of mission agencies in Latin America with contact information, both in an online database format and downloadable as a 239-page Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file. The directory, compiled by Ted Limpic, a missionary with SEPAL and director of research for COMIBAM, was published in October 2002.

IDEA Ministries, directed by Clifton Holland, focuses on Latin American church growth research and spiritual mapping. “IDEA seeks to forward the Great Commission, primarily in Latin America and the Caribbean regions, through…advanced leadership training and development; missiological research, information management and communication; strategic planning and networking.”

PROLADES, a sister ministry of IDEA, is developing a Religion-In-The-Americas (RITA) Database Project. Still in the initial stages, their objective is to create “a computer database and directory of the headquarters address and other basic information about all religious groups in every country of Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Also of interest at the PROLADES site is the Institute for Socio-Religious Studies/Instituto de Estudios Socio-religiosos (IDES). PROLADES sponsors an internet discussion group, a public conference for those interested in the study of religious groups in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is available both on the Web and via e-mail religion_latinamerica@egroups.com.

The Network for Strategic Missions provides a wealth of missions articles and forums related to Latin America. Go to the NSM site, click on the Latin America link next to the Regions tab. Clicking on the KnowledgeBase tab then displays the titles of over 350 articles on Latin America; clicking on any title displays the full text of the article. Alternatively, click on the Countries link on the NSM homepage and select a particular country name. For each country, there is a good bit of “Overview” information. To explore further, click on the KnowledgeBase tab at the top of any country page to read articles in the NSM KnowledgeBase related to that country. The URL will filter for only those articles dealing with Latin America in the Knowledge-Base.

The Religion in Latin America site was developed by the Latin American Studies Program of Providence College, a Catholic liberal arts college in Rhode Island. It provides: information, research, discussion, and analysis of religion in Latin America. The site emphasizes history of Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, Evangelical, indigenous and Afro-Latin American religions. Sources for religion and politics are treated in detail. References for theology of liberation and other Latin American theologies are given. Key documents and statistics about the Catholic Church are provided at the site.

Adherents.com is: a growing collection of over 41,000 adherent statistics and religious geography citations—references to published membership/adherent statistics and congregation statistics for over 4,200 religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, ultimate concerns, etc.

Click on a region or country name to read annotated church statistics from multiple sources, together with source information and often links to source Web sites.

Latin America Mission has developed a well designed and helpful Web site, including a links page to “Material about missions in Latin America”.

SEPAL, a Brazilian mission agency associated with OC International, is an excellent source of high-level missions information about Brazil. Fortunately for those of us illiterate in Portuguese, they also maintain a parallel site in English. InfoBrazil is another service of Sepal and provides a great collection of church and missions information about Brazil, including missions graphs and charts in Spanish, Portuguese and English.

SIL offers a collection of educational and linguistic resources in Spanish, focused on Bible translation ministry needs for indigenous peoples of Latin America.

Letra Viva (Spanish for “Living Letter”); is a valuable resource for those writing for the evangelical church in Latin America. It is: a network of evangelical book publishers working within the Spanish speaking countries of Latin America, seeking to produce contextualised and biblical publications. The network was formed in 1996 by a group of publishers which shared the same vision of improving the distribution, quality and impact of Christian books in Latin America.

A rapidly growing collection of popular evangelical Web sites springing up in various Latin American countries. Examples of major Christian gateway sites include Christia-Net.com in Argentina; Cristo.net in Costa Rica; and Integridad.com a Latin Christian gateway site maintained in Pennsylvania.

COUNTRY INFORMATION SITES
If you are looking for in-depth information about a particular Latin American country, the Web, again, is a helpful starting place.

The CIA World Factbook maintains a detailed profile of every country. As expected, the site is focused on more technical information of interest to the US government.

Eldis offers a vast amount of high-quality country profile information, focused primarily on development issues.

On a more popular level, Country Reports.org consists of some 1,500 pages of information designed more for students and tourists. It even includes links that play the national anthem of each country.

The LANIC Country Directory has a wealth of quality links for every country in Latin America, covering everything from culture to government and from health to tourism.

There are several excellent sites devoted to official governments documents and offices. Both the Latin America section of the Foreign Governments site maintained by the University of Michigan Documents Center and American Governments on the Web have excellent links to the official government information sites for each country in Latin America. The Latin American and Caribbean Government Documents Project links to government and statistical sources of information in Latin America. Collected by David Block at Cornell, the site is dedicated to official information produced by Latin American government agencies (federal, departmental, and local) and consists of annotated tables that link to a huge collection of documents.

RESEARCH RESOURCES
Serious researchers will not be disappointed with what the Web has to offer for Latin American studies. Perhaps because of its close geographic proximity to the US, a number of American educational institutions have invested heavily in compiling and giving online access to substantial research resources on this region.

The Latin American Network Information Center¹ (LANIC) is “one of the oldest, most comprehensive and popular” Web sites for Latin American studies, “with millions of hits per month.” It is affiliated with an institute at the University of Texas at Austin and, while most of their resources are designed to facilitate research and academic endeavors, it has become an important gateway to Latin America for private and public sector professionals. “LANIC’s editorially reviewed directories contain over twelve thousand unique URL’s, one of the largest guides for Latin American content on the Internet.” Their Libraries and Reference in Latin America section includes directories on:

• Libraries and Archives—Associations, Online Catalogs, Schools and Research Institutions, Digital Libraries, Hardware and Software

• Maps—Regional and Country Maps from Latin America

• Museums—Countries, Regional Resources, International

• Publishers and Bookdealers—Latin American Book Dealers and Publishers by Country, Online Books

• Reference—Biographies, Calculators and Converters, Dictionaries, Directories, Encyclopedias, General Reference, Time

• Statistics—Countries, Regional, International Resources

As mentioned above, the Countries section of LANIC presents an extensive directory of cataloged links for each country. Most of the country pages include a wealth of relevant links under the “Academic Research Resources” heading. A few of the countries have other sub-directories of particular interest to missions, including Indigenous Peoples, Anthropology and Archeology, and Religion and Theology.

The Association of Research Libraries site is a sub-set of the LANIC site, and is a function of the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project. It includes the Latin American Periodicals Tables of Contents (LAPTOC), “a searchable Web database that provides access to the tables of contents of more than seven hundred journals published in Latin America” with an emphasis on the humanities and social sciences.

The Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress edits HLAS Online, the Internet version of its annual Handbook of Latin American Studies, a “bibliography on Latin America consisting of works selected and annotated by scholars.” “Each year, more than 130 academics from around the world choose over five thousand works for inclusion in the Handbook,” mostly in the social sciences and humanities. You can easily search HLAS for relevant words; for instance, searching for “evangelical” gives ninety-two hits; “missionary” gives 832 hits; “Christian,” 1573 hits.

HAPI Online is “the searchable Web version of the Hispanic American Periodicals Index,” a valuable information source on Latin America as well as Hispanics in the United States. “From analyses of current political, economic, and social issues to unique coverage of Latin American arts and letters, HAPI Online contains complete bibliographic citations to articles, book reviews, documents, original literary works, and other materials appearing in more than four hundred key social science and humanities journals published throughout the world.” It covers journals published from 1970 to the present, and contains more than 210,000 citations. HAPI Online is produced by the editorial staff of the UCLA Latin American Center and is available via a variety of subscription arrangements.

Internet Resources for Latin America is compiled by the New Mexico State University Library (Las Cruces). Sections of the guide include Latin American directories, subscription databases, public domain databases, electronic books, digital library projects, newsgroups listings and much more.

We mentioned above the extensive country profile information provided by Eldis. This site also serves as a gateway to a vast collection of online and print articles on “development in countries of the South.” Hosted by the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, UK, it covers social, economic, political and environmental issues.

FindArticles.com is an online archive of published articles that you can search for free, from more than three hundred magazines and journals dating back to 1998. It uses a familiar search approach to find articles that include designated words or phrases. For instance, searching for +”Latin America” +missionary yields 134 articles; +”Latin America” +missions find 270 articles and +”Latin America” +evangelical finds117.

Repositories of Primary Sources provides a listing of over 1,600 Web sites worldwide, including Latin America, describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs and other primary materials.

NEWS AND GENERAL INFORMATION
You can access the latest news and information from throughout Latin America via the Web, including online newspapers and magazines, as well as radio and Web journals.

Both Newslink and Latin America Online News Services link directly to the leading online newspapers within each country. Many of these offer English language editions.

Zona Latina covers the whole world of online Latin American secular media, including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, internet newsletters and marketing research.

Latin America Mission’s Latin News Links page has a good collection of links to news from and about Latin America from leading news sources. It also links to world news sites and Christian news services.

LatinWorld focuses on arts and culture (music, books, videos) and describes itself as the “premier search engine for Iberoamerica and the Caribbean.” They even have a kids’ site.

Latino News Network, founded in 1998 by a group of Latinos in their twenties, is dedicated to providing Latinos an outlet to showcase their stories, their talents and their skills. LATNN.com is dedicated to becoming a first-rate news and information Web site and providing multimedia content to those who are interested in learning more about Latinos both as a market and as a community.

Housed at Temple University (Philadelphia), it desires to serve the particular interests of Latinos in the US as well as in Latin America.
Of course, the familiar Web search engines and directories are useful for finding a wide array of information of interest. Take Google, for instance:

• Searching Google for +”Latin America” +evangelical +missions results in over seven thousand hits.

• The regional Google directories offer many excellent links, including Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

• Google Discussion Groups cover a wide range of topics; on the Google home page, click the Groups tab. Searching for +“Latin America” +evangelical +missions displays some three hundred topics in dozens of dedicated discussion groups.

Northern Light has long been a favorite for finding high quality information. On their home page, enter Latin America evangelical missions in the search engine and you will find some five hundred items from over three hundred different sources, together with a dozen specialized sub-topics. Search for Latin America evangelical and find over 1,300 items; then click on the “missiology” subtopic to focus in on twenty-eight items from ten sources.

As we’ve seen, there is already a rich supply of information resources on the Web to support missions work in Latin America. The future promises far greater information access, as the Web continues to grow and change every day. We encourage you to keep checking back with the MisLinks Latin America page for updates. And continue sending your suggestions for new links we should add (using the e-mail link on the MisLinks Web site); we take all suggestions seriously.

Endnote
1. LANIC is also known as The WWW Virtual Library: Latin America Studies.

References
MacHarg, Kenneth. 2003. “Latin America: The Unfinished Task.” World Pulse, March 21, 2003; 38, 5.

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Scott Moreau is editor of EMQ and chair of Missions and Intercultural Studies at Wheaton College Graduate School (Wheaton, Ill.). His e-mail address is A.S.Moreau@wheaton.edu , and the Wheaton Missions Department Web address is: www.wheaton.edu/intr

Mike O’Rear is the president of Global Mapping International (Colorado Springs, Colo.), which is dedicated to providing access to information for church and mission leaders, especially in the Two-thirds world. He also serves as Lausanne senior associate for information technology. His e-mail address is www.gmi.org

EMQ, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 374-380. Copyright © 2003 Evangelism and Missions Information Service (EMIS). All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMIS.

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