June 2008

Friends,

As I write this, Linnis and I have nine months’ service remaining in Brazil. Please don’t think we’re already gone, because we aren’t! We have a great deal to do yet. Think of some of the other things that can happen in nine months’ time! It is, however, a time for reflection on the time we have been privileged to serve here, which will come to just 22 years when we leave. And I thought: why not share these reflections with our good friends who read our newsletters? I have stories I haven’t told. They are stories I couldn’t have told at the time, but I can tell them now. In a series of future newsletters, I will tell some of these stories. In this one, I will try to sum up some of the changes that have taken place since we arrived in March of 1987.

There are changes in ourselves: we were in mid-life when we arrived, and now we are retirement age. Persons here have become dear to us, including some who have died. It was here that I found the work I really wanted to do. I will no longer be a professor at the seminary of my Brazilian church, the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil (IPIB). I will miss being a professor at the Methodist University of São Paulo, where I help to represent the IPIB in an ecumenical graduate school (I will have an ongoing connection with them for a while). And then there are my hobbies: Brazilian literature, Brazilian history, Brazilian travel.

The missionary situation has changed. We were welcomed to Brazil by our Brazilian church, but there were also PC(USA) missionaries who invited us to dinner and a great deal else. They are gone from Brazil now. After us, one missionary couple will remain—in a different state. In 1987 there was still an organization called “the mission.” We were actually told at first to stay away from it, because our appointment was part of a new way of doing things and we were under the supervision of our Brazilian church from day one. The mission had already shrunk by then, and has since shrunk to nothing. I was actually president of it (not an honor but a necessity) when it met for the last time and officially went out of business. It had to happen, even though we missionaries had put up a fight to keep the mission office.

My Brazilian church is quite vigorous, even though it has to struggle. My fellow missionary, Dick Irwin, has shared a write-up he made of the Central Brazil Mission’s work in 1964, entitled “Brazilian Adventure.” At that time, the missionaries were concerned that the kind of Christianity that was growing in the churches they planted was a bit too passive and dependent, that the Christians were content to receive a gospel that came from somewhere else. I was amazed when I read that, because the Christianity I knew in Presbyterian churches where I live is so different. Protestants here, usually called evangelicals, are nicknamed “crentes,” and the crente is always doing something. Tithing and evangelism are taken seriously. It may seem like an old-fashioned Christianity, but it is hardly a passive one. What a difference from the passive Christianity the missionaries struggled with!

There are changes in where we live. Around the corner from us is a theatre where we saw real movies 20 years ago. It has long since become a porn theatre. Another movie house nearby is now the world headquarters of the International Church of the Grace of God. Still another is a bingo parlor. Two others are closed up tight. The area took a blow when its fanciest hotel closed and moved out to make way for a freeway. But there is some elegance left. A stone’s throw away is a fancy French restaurant where we never go (Well, twice in our 22 years). It has held on, as has a stuffy literary society next door to it. Middle class people are walking their dogs in the praça at ten o’ clock at night, and we are among them.

I think of the changes often when I work in the kitchen. It is full of stuff that we bought in department stores named Mappin and Mesbla, which were within walking distance. They both went out of business long ago, and one would have to go shopping in a mall to furnish a kitchen here now.

Twenty years ago one took one’s own shopping bag to the grocery store, and no one used a seat belt. In little things like that, customs have changed. One thing that has stayed almost the same is the network of streets and freeways, but they are now occupied by a lot more cars and a lot more motorcycles.

Back then, the country was coming out of a dictatorship, and one could still sense some of the old fear. Since then, we have witnessed 20 years of fascinating history.

I could go on. Part of what I have to do now is to write and leave something behind me for the Brazilian theological educational effort for which I have been working. But I am also going to write for you, the mission-supporting readers of newsletters. In the next one, I will tell a specific story about something that has changed.

In mission,

Arch Woodruff

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 276