October 18, 2004

SAO LEOPOLDO, Brazil - Upon commemorating 180 years of presence in the country, Lutheran Evangelicals committed themselves to assuming their public responsibility with greater strength, contributing to making Brazil a more just country, marked by solidarity, which is able to overcome poverty and misery.

At the same time, they promised to continue struggle for peace, justice and the integrity of creation, to work for social inclusion and to combine their ecumenical commitment with the missionary task.

These commitments are contained in the declaration signed in the XXIV General Council of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil (IECLB), which met October 13-17 in Sao Leopoldo, state of Rio Grande do Sul.

It was this city that received the first German immigrants who arrived in Brazil in 1824. The central theme of the Council was "Along the ways of hope," and it congregated 130 delegates from 18 synods in the IECLB, as well as ecumenical guests from Brazil and abroad.

The declaration recognizes the Church and theological legacy brought by the immigrants as well as the relationships and help from Churches and missionary societies in Germany and other countries.

"The IECLB has progressively developed as a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic entity, committed to the promotion of citizenship and community spirit, although in a slow process, both because of our cultural burden and because we consciously renounced proselytist practices," affirmed the document.

The text recognizes that the immigrants occupied, in different senses, the place that indigenous communities could have occupied who lived on this lands and the Black Brazilian communities, for which they ask forgiveness. The communities that developed here are an involuntary part of the history of injustice and the lack of social equity in our country, it recognized.

After mentioning the 100th anniversary of Jewish immigration to Rio Grande do Sul, the declaration recognized that during the years that Nazism ruled in Germany "we were not totally immune to the ideology of the Arian racial superiority" and asked forgiveness from God and any who were offended.

The document contains a historic, sober and realistic analysis, which is not marked by triumphalism, of how they lived the Christian faith within the social, political and cultural circumstances of the times. "It helps us to understand that in the present we have a faith marked by contradictions," declared the second vice president of the IECLB, Rolf Sch|nemann.

Based on this reality, the document points to key challenges facing the confession, emphasized by the first vice president of the IECLB, Homero Severo Pinto. The call for forgiveness is pertinent, as frequently people believe that the prejudices are true, added pastor Teobaldo Witter of Cuiaba.

ALC News Service