Growing up in Chile. I experienced the tension between Catholic and Evangelical sides of Christianity. During the week I attended the best Roman Catholic school in town and on Sunday and holidays I received an injection of Protestant Sunday school and a good Southern Baptist preaching. Only the love and somewhat ironic spirit of my parent helped me to keep my sanity. The danger of spiritual achizophrenia was always there, but also the promise of a more wholesome vision of spiritual life. Its fulfillment had to wait until I discovered the riches of the Anglican tradition.

I became a Baptist pastor at twenty one, but that did not deter me from developing “dangerous liasons”. Along with ecumenically minded friends in the Student Christian Movement, I read Marx and Maritain, Barth and Tillich, and remained in touch with writers and young poiticians who where looking for a new society and searchaing for metaphysical anwsers outside the church. It was an exciting time and I felt the hand of God guiding me to explore new territories, struggling to reconcile faith and reason and the claims of Jesus Christ with the cries of the people for a more just and human society. I am greatful for all those years as a pastor to a working-class congregation and chaplain to universary students on the threshold of a socialist revolution.

But things were going to change dramatically for the Chilean people and my own personal life. The military and the “left” in Chle clashed with tragic and long lasting consequences, and as I about to leave for Europe with my wife and small son to study theology, I was diagnosed with cancer. Instead of going to France I ended up at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, Texas, where a painful and long treatment eventually saved my life. The political crisis in Chile and my health forced me to remain in United States, but I was able to resume my pastoral work, and since then I have has the privilege of exercising my ministry in Washington, D.C., Virginia and California.

Because I grew up in Evangilical circles, I became a member of the Church through the narrow door of personal conversion. As a consequence, my life has been enriched by a Catholic vision with high view of the Church and Sacraments, but that initial encounter with Christ in my adolescence, norture by the love and Christian zeal of family and community, had an impact forever on the character of my discipleship. To use the language of my early days in the faith,”inviting Christ into my life” was indeed a profound experience of repentance and grace. Sustained by the surrender, I became committed member of the local congregation and soon a pastor and teacher, an evangelist and misionary of the love of God in Christ. Many things have changed in the landscape of my life except for that ongoing spiritual reality of perceiving God in Christ at the sacred mistery from which I receive power, meaning, renewal and hope.

According to what the Gospel requires, my pilgrimage of faith has taken place in the company of others. That communal dimension relates to the present and to the past, including the holy lives of men and women who were models for me in the following of Christ. Some of them are historical figures, others just common people who loved and served the Lord, making transparent the presence of that love. Through many years of serving missions and churches in Latin American and the United States, I have learned to discern Christ in the face of my brothers and sisters as much as I receive Christ through the Scriptures and the Sacraments. I agree with Kallistos Ware, Now an Orthodox bishop, when he says, “Christ is looking at us through the eyes of all those whom we meet. Once we recognize his universal presence, all our acts of practical service to others become acts of prayer”.

I pray that in spirit and in truth, I may continue to abide in Christ and that Christ abides in me. Brcaise He is Resurrection and Life, “apart from him, I can do nothing”. I could not have stayed in this ministry for so long without the conviction of His call: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and I appointed you to go forth and bear fruit, fruit that will last” (John 15:16).
As I look at the Episcopal Church today, the issues of unity in diversity, of evangelism and mission, of peace and justice seem of paramount importance. In our Church there is an intense struggle between factions representing conflicting theologies intending to speak for the Church and, in the worst scenario, trying to control the Church. It is especially sad when those ideoligical differences are accompanied by personal hostility and bad faith. But we should not give up. As Gordon Light of Canada says, in spite of our vast differences, we have to find the will and the desire to stay together. “If we have a special gift to offer as Anglicans, it is the gift of connecting. The Anglican genius is the genius of relationship. We belong to a family as wide and as culturally diverse as the world itself… There are voices among us arguing for greater uniformity within the Communion, but by and large, we hold dear our ties that give us both a sense of belonging and a freedom to know (and make known) God in our particular contexts”.

Regarding mission and evangelism, I would like to see that we maintain the traditional Anglican model of pastoral care and nurture along with a renewed emphasis on proclamation and service. We certainly must be sensitive to the culture and beliefs of others without giving up the obligation to extend the invitation to follow Christ. I believe that it is still important to plant new churches without renouncing our duty to relieve human need and to change social structures of oppression.
The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez places these concerns in the right perspective when he ask, “How can we speak of the love of god to the person who is oppressed, the exploited, the proletarian, the one deprived of the fruit of his labor and despoiled of being a person?”. I believe that we as Christians are called to be their voice and messengers of the voice of God who demands justice. We certainly need the powerful voice of our preachers and evangelists, the patience and commitment of our missionaries; but we also need the courageous insights of our prophets. In a world tragically divided between the rich and the poor, and obsessed with accumulation of weapons of massive destruction, it is the prophets who denounce our alienation from God and our lack of solidarity. We cannot do less because our vocation is to be living witness of our crucified and risen Lord who in the words of Juan Luis Segundo, calls us to work with him as “artisan of a new humanity”.