Reflections on Latin American Member Care

by Carlos Pinto

It is recognized that the member care movement in Latin America started around the 1999-2000s (O’Donnell 2011). In this article, I would like to introduce the idea that, symbolically, we could say that as a movement, Latin member care workers are in an adolescent stage. We have a lot of passion, but we are not well integrated or mature, and we do not have a clear identity.

It is recognized that the member care movement in Latin America started around the 1999-2000s (O’Donnell 2011). In this article, I would like to introduce the idea that, symbolically, we could say that as a movement, Latin member care workers are in an adolescent stage. We have a lot of passion, but we are not well integrated or mature, and we do not have a clear identity.

We could, therefore, be described as being in our first stage of development and heavily influenced by North American perspectives and practices that have both positive and challenging outcomes. It is noteworthy that a similar type of reflection is taking place among researchers of the history of Latin American psychology (Gallegos 2012; Klappenbach 2012).

The mentioned influence from the North has been beneficial. However, in order to continue growing into a new stage in a healthy manner, a process of differentiation from the Anglo-Saxon movement is needed. It is important for the Latin American member care movement to develop member care principles and practices that reflect the Latin culture with its whole array of very different nuances and practical needs on the part of their missionaries. Working on differentiation first could help us to develop our code of “best practices.”

This is a process that needs to be conceived, practiced, and validated within this culture and by natives who are proud of and value their culture, and who are also open to recognize, dialogue with, and include new and positive elements that belong to the global member care community.

In this article, I would like to suggest that in order to move on to a next stage of indigenization and ownership of the Latin American member care movement by Latin Americans themselves, a few things are needed:

1. A healthy process of differentiation from the Anglo-Saxon member care movement
2. Establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between the history, culture, psychology, and missions in Latin America
3. Identifying which mental health or psychological schools of thought are more consistent with the Latin American cultural matrix
4. Beginning to test and apply on the mission field some principles and practices of member care by and with Latin Americans in order to validate the best ones.

Once we have done these things, we will be in a position to engage in a better informed global member care dialogue. Let me develop a few of these ideas.

History

According to Kelly O’Donnell (2011) in Global Member Care, Volume One: The Pearls and Perils of Good Practice, the development of the global member care movement goes back to the 1960s, when the mission organization of Wycliffe developed its counseling department. He also identifies the 1980s as the decade when the dialogue between psychology and missions started to flourish with the catalytic role of the mental health and missions conferences in the United States, which also started in the 1980s.

Here, O’Donnell indicates that “separate interagency member care groups” took place in the Middle East in 1993, North Africa in 1994, Europe in 1997, Asia in 1998, Central Asia in 1998, and Latin America in 1999.” The initial history of the Latin American missionary movement is related to a few individual efforts that evolved within the Iberoamerican Missionary Cooperation Movement (COMIBAM) in the 1990s. In a personal email communication with Kelly O’Donnell, he indicated to me the following:

One of the earliest proponents of what you are saying that I can find in writing is Pablo Carrillo in October 1995—International Bulletin of Frontier Missions, volume 12(4). Struggles of Latin Americans in Frontier Missions. An updated version was published in Doing MC Well (2002).

As I recall, the first organized network for MC (Member Care) in the evangelical world came together in 1999 as part of COMIBAM. Marcia Tostes from Brazil was involved and others, including myself… I think most of these materials were translations into Spanish although there were some authors from Latin America. Note also that chapters 15-18 in Doing MC Well are from Latinos/Brazilians.

In conclusion, the member care movement from and in Latin America is relatively new and needs to grow. Hopefully, in future years, a history of our movement can be written by a Latin American historian who can gather relevant data on this subject.

This work is important because knowing one’s history helps to distinguish the ways of thinking that are a product of a foreign influence and the ways of thinking that belong to our own cultural matrix. This is important for the self-understanding needed for creative and practical development of effective Latin member care tools and practices.

Considering this, it is interesting to note that psychologists in Argentina are now asking themselves what impact the editorial enterprises in their country have played in the installation of certain themes and perspectives in the development of psychology in their country (Klappenbach 2012). These types of research questions help discern which psychological principles and practices came from outside and which ones have a more local root. This is also of foundational importance in developing new cutting-edge approaches.

Differentiation

According to Murray Bowen (1978), a truly “differentiated person” is not synonymous of separation or isolation from others. On the contrary, differentiated people tend to have more mature and loving interdependent relationships, and can have a better capacity to compete and collaborate with others.

He also says that people who only react to others and who can’t make their own choices are not free to work and love well. So then, poorly differentiated people end up seeking love, approval, and relatedness in unhealthy ways (Titleman 1998).

As we look at our future dialogue and cooperation within the global member care movement, the process of our becoming psychologically independent with clear boundaries of self and others is important. As Latin member care givers, we need to differentiate from the North American member care movement. This is an important requirement in order to make for healthy interaction. Without having done this, our tendency will be to continue vacillating between positions of rejection to those of over-bonding without discernment.

Similar perceptions and feelings have been expressed from other voices of the Global South. For instance, in reflecting about indigenous missions in India, Duthie Rajesh wrote, “Since God used the western missionaries to bring the Gospel, we are still western in our thinking of reaching the people with the Gospel” (Duthie 2008, 25).

When reflecting upon the need for developing an African theology, African theologian Simon Maimela says, “The challenge is to remember and reconstruct African identity and theology” (Maimela 1997). He observes that degradation and domination made South Africans suspicious of the acculturation in the reconstruction of African theology. Maimela recommends a process in which they remember their cultural roots and disengage from negative foreign influences of oppression. He asserts that this is the needed task in order to attain an indigenous African theology.

Coming back to our discussion on Latin America member care, it is important that we find ways to take a more neutral position (not reactive or merging without criteria) and increase the ‘differentiation’ from the big body of literature on member care that has been translated from English to Spanish in order to work on finding our own identity and our own path of development.

I am certainly not against global integration; however, as a Latin American who was born and raised in this region, I would like to encourage us to work on discovering first who we are and what are we doing differently and then use these findings to improve our own set of beliefs and interventions.

We need to examine our most frequent mentalities and leave behind certain internal myths, such as the one that says, “The people from the United States and Europe are better prepared than us Latins; they have better education and they know more.” 

It is interesting to learn that the “Sociedad Interamericana de Psicología (the Inter-American Psychological Society) was constituted in 1951. One of the historical reasons for starting this organization was to help recognize that North American psychology was well developed and rich and Latin American psychology was still young in its development but with its own richness. In addition, they felt a desire for integration between the two in order to expand on this, and deepen this process of integration.

At the same time, within the Inter-American Psychological Society a time of separation from the hegemonic North American psychology took place among the psychologists in Latin America in the 1960s. After a rather short period of time when the Latin American psychologists became more integrated among themselves as a supranational community, a new historical stage in the 1980s started which is the current period and is known as the period of “internationalization,” or the period of becoming international (Salas 2014).

Recognizing the cultural and historical differences between the North and the South helped the Inter-American Psychological Society to develop a healthy agenda of dialogue and mutual recognition and to start a horizontal cooperative relationship (Gallegos 2012).

It seems that a similar process of raising the awareness of where our distinctness lies is a needed first step for a later enriched cooperation within the missionary member care movement between Latin and North American circles.

This process of differentiation will help us to be less dependent on foreign member care principles and practices that in large part do not take into account some of our most prominent and basic needs. And it will direct us in the development of our own set of propositions and techniques that we can be empirically testing within our contexts.

We need to examine our most frequent mentalities and leave behind certain internal myths, such as the one that says, “The people from the United States and Europe are better prepared than us Latins; they have better education and they know more.” This kind of mentality, which sees others like ‘parents’ who have the ultimate intellectual authority and ourselves as ‘children’, is prevalent in South America.

The other side of the coin that produces a pathological complementary role to this is when Anglo member care personnel and others come to the Latin American region to ‘teach’ instead of to learn. As a result, instead of this open stance of interdependence, they end up adopting an unconscious parental role.

Psychological Frameworks and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

There are, among others, three well-known conceptual frameworks of science applied to family theories and psychology:

• The positivistic, which has the goal to explain and predict phenomena
   
• The interpretative, which has the goal of understanding and interpreting the meanings that families assign to their behavior
   
• The critical framework, which has the goal to attain the emancipation and empowerment of social groups, including the family (Neuman 1994)

Critical theory is oriented towards critiquing and changing society as a whole instead of just understanding and explaining it like the positivistic and interpretive theories tend to do. Due to this, critical theory speaks to the Latin heart because the cry for social transformation is very much alive.

An important question which needs to be tested on the field are the mentioned conceptual frameworks that seem the most appropriate to help Latin Americans explain and predict our psychological way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. To make it more explicit, which of the mentioned theories actually prove to be the most helpful to develop family missionary care practices for families that are from this region?

We have a history of Spaniard and other colonizations that are part of our self-identity. This also needs to be taken into consideration when choosing a particular school of psychology that can help us to understand the internal unconscious dynamics of the nature of our behavior.

As Latins, we share a confluent heritage of our indigenous pre-Colombian roots on the one side and our European roots coming in on the other side. We have a mix of experiences and worldviews. These two currents have given birth to the core Latin psyche that has flourished in the middle of countless historic tensions and forces that have produced reformations and modernization.

Very different from our heritage of colonization, the formation of the core North American psyche comes out of a history of the pilgrims and others who came to America, and with much effort were able to form a nation. As a result, their focus is on production, success, individualism, and the pride that comes from the accomplishments of both national and personal hard-won efforts.

The conceptual frameworks of critical theory and conflict theory focus on power, social conflict, and inequality, and in this sense facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue. They incorporate time and history into their analysis of psychological facts. Also, they and the systems perspective are only a few theories that link family studies with the larger social systems and historical processes. I propose that we consider these particular frameworks as ones that can help us to understand the nature of our behavior as it connects us with our past and with our present within a larger psychosocial context.

Liberation social psychology has the aim to understand the psychology of oppressed and impoverished communities. These issues form part of the core psyche of the Latin American person. 

These are not ahistorical psychological approaches; instead, they attempt to explain how families deal with changes and adversity, which is a common factor in Latin America where socio-economic inequality is huge. However, this dialogue needs to be carried out in ways that do not compromise our core Christian beliefs.

It is interesting to note that in both Africa and Latin America, quite a few churches have embraced liberation theology perspectives. However, these have not been accepted as well by the conservative evangelicals from the United States. The liberation theology perspective talks about oppression, freedom, justice, and socioeconomic inequality.

At the same time, liberation social psychology has the aim to understand the psychology of oppressed and impoverished communities. These issues form part of the core psyche of the Latin American person; while these issues for the most part are not part of the interest of the mainstream North American individual. Thankfully, however, there is a new spirit of integration in the United States and other Western churches that is growing.

Considering our Latin psyche and idiosyncrasies, the ‘conflict’, ‘systems’, and ‘liberation social psychology’ frameworks and family focus theories could be more compatible and useful than others. This is because they take into consideration the issues of cognitions, feelings, and behaviors that became prominent as a result of our history of colonization, oppression, and ongoing social conflicts.

The classical western type of psychological training is oriented to the individual and does not take into account larger social systems and issues of parenting, justice, machismo, helplessness, etc.

In the United States a particular psychological school of thought and practice (cognitive behavioral therapy) became very popular. One of the reasons that this has happened is because it has proved to be an efficient type of therapy and also because it is a short-term approach and therefore the insurance companies adopted this particular therapy for financial reasons.

I would like to put the caution out that although the embracement of this particular psychological approach became the best option in a particular setting for several valid reasons, this doesn’t mean this therapy would be the best option for individuals who are from the Latin culture.

Weissman (Smith and Gingrich 2014, 111) reflects on the need to integrate more psychology and missions dialogue. He also talks about the lack of effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy in our type of settings, saying, “Several short term trials of CBT and interpersonal treatments [were] administered among the poor in several countries by community health workers.

While these results are encouraging, they are ameliorative not transformational.” He goes on to say that, “They address a person’s relationship with self and perhaps with God but not with others, community, and creation.”

The Latin American missionary movement needs to figure out which psychological frames of references, or types of therapy, work best for us considering our unique idiosyncrasies. For instance, in our choosing a school of psychology to work with, one thing that is important to take into account is the fact that the Latin culture is more relationally oriented and that the North American culture is more individualistic, as well as product-oriented and pragmatic.

Again, it is very important that we keep in mind that psychological approaches that have been effective among North Americans might not be so effective among Latin Americans since there are sociocultural and economic differences.

Our extremely different historical realities are very much alive and part of the individual make-up of the missionaries from each of these origins and they play out in countless ways in the styles of thinking, relating, and operating on the part of the individuals from each of these regions.

It is in light of this that I am pointing out that psychological frameworks that are ahistoric and functionally oriented are what have worked well among North Americans, but that these would likely not be as helpful among individuals in the Latin culture. This is a personal hypothesis which needs to be tried and tested in order to be confirmed or rejected in the different settings in which we operate. Also, considering that the Latin American culture is very much family oriented, it makes sense that systems family focus theories and family therapy-oriented psychological approaches would be very useful in the interventions used in member care endeavors when treating missionaries from this region. Again, it would be good to engage in a research process in our fields of member care in order to validate or discard this idea.

Conclusion

Global member care would ideally be defined as a body of theory and practices that reflect the heterogeneity of the world. However, much of the current worldwide member care literature reflects a strong reliance on the Anglo-Saxon perspectives.

The Latin American member care movement is quite new and a process of differentiation could become a catalytic factor to help it to grow in its roots and projections with identifying psychological frameworks that address the contextual realities of the region. The Latin American psychology movement recommends the use of psychology that leads to social action which considers our sociopolitical realities (Torres and Consoli 2015).

This is also known as Liberation Social Psychology and includes new concepts in community psychology, adopting a broader and interdisciplinary approach. These could provide a new addition from the Latin America region to the global member care movement. If we work in these areas, then we will be in the position to engage in healthy mutual learning and a collaborative process within the global member care movement.

I want to end by echoing what the editorial note of the Indian Mission Association quarterly magazine indicates in their July-September 2008 issue:

There is a need to create Indian Christian leaders [in this discussion, it would be member care Latin American leaders] who, without intimidation, would be able to meet global leadership and dialogue with them. As equals.

References

Bowen, Murray. 1978. Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. New York: Jason Aronson.

Duthie, R. 2008. “New Paradigms of Mobilizing Missionaries in the Present Indian/Global Context.” Indian Missions, July – September, 24-26.

Gallegos, M. 2012. “Historia de la Psicología Interamericana: Sociedad Interamericana de Psicología (1951).” Psicología Latina, 1012, 3(1): 23-36.

Klappenbach, H. 2012. “La Historia de la Psicología en Argentina e Iberoamérica: Entrevista con Hugo Klappenbach.”

Maimela, Simon. 1997. “Cultural and Ethnic Diversity in Promotion of Democratic Change.” In Democracy and Development in Africa: The Role of Churches. Ed. J. N. K. Mugambi. Nairobi, Kenya: All Africa Conference of Churches.

Neuman, W. Lawrence. 1994. Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon.

O’Donnell, Kelly. 2011. Global Member Care, Volume One: The Pearls and Peril of Good Practice. Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library.

Salas, G. 2014. Historias de la Psicología en América del sur. Chile: Nueve Miranda Ediciones.

Smith, Bradford and Fred Gingrich. 2014. “Psychology in the Context of Holistic Mission: The Challenges of Witness, Worldview and Poverty.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 33(2): 101-113.

Torres, Hector and Andres Consoli. 2015. “Moving toward a New Relationship with Latin American Psychology.” Psychology International. June.

Titelman, Peter, ed. 1998. Clinical Applications of Bowen Family Systems Theory. Binghamton, N.Y.: The Hawthorn Press.

White, James and David Klein. 2008. Family Theories, 3rd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.

. . . . 

Dr. Carlos Pinto is a Peruvian clinical psychologist (PsyD, Wheaton College) who serves with several mission agencies as a consultant of member care for Latin American missionaries. He and his wife, Rebecca, live in Quito, Ecuador. 

EMQ, Vol. 52, No. 4. Copyright  © 2016 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.  All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.

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