The PROLADES Team, under the direction of Clifton L. Holland, began to update
its previous research on Hispanic Protestant ministry in the USA in January
2010, which was a continuation of Holland's personal efforts begun in 1970
while studying in the M.A. in Missiology program (1969-1972) at Fuller
Theological Seminary (FTS) in Pasadena, CA. The result of Holland's fieldwork
on the Hispanic community in Southern California was the publication of The Religious Dimension in Hispanic
Los Angeles: A Protestant Case Study (Pasadena, CA: William Carey
Library, 1974, 554 pages). Between 1972 and 1980, Holland served as a
Protestant missionary in Costa Rica with the nondenominational Latin America
Mission, which provided him with an opportunity of conducting fieldwork on the
Protestant movement in each country of Central America. Holland returned to FTS
in 1980-1981 for Doctor of Missiology studies in the School of World Mission,
where he produced "A History of the Protestant Movement in Central
America" (450 pages) and served as General Editor for the production of World Christianity: Central America
and the Caribbean (Monrovia, CA: MARC-World Vision International,
1982).
After Holland's return to Costa Rica in
1982, he was invited to provide technical assistance and training as a
missiologist for urban and national research projects in a dozen countries,
including Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Venezuela, Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and Mexico. Also, during the 1980s, Holland provided
technical assistance to Hispanic leaders in the USA who were interested in
conducting a national study of Hispanic Protestantism, which had not been done
since the 1930s when Protestant ministry among Hispanics was just beginning to
flourish with support from the major denominations and service agencies. During
the mid-1980s, Holland coordinated a preliminary report on Hispanic Protestant
church growth in the USA (published in March 1987 byPROLADES,
led by Holland) with the support of two dozen Hispanic and Anglo-American
church leaders; however, at that time, it was impossible to obtain major
funding from foundations, denominations and service agencies to conduct a
thorough national study. Nevertheless, steps were taken by several members of
this same support group to create a national non-profit organization led by
Hispanic leaders who had been inspired by this preliminary national
study. This led to the creation of the Hispanic Association for Bilingual-Bicultural
Ministries (HABBM) in 1988-1989, led by the Rev. Danny de León
(senior pastor of Templo Calvario
de las Asambleas de Dios in Santa Ana, CA), largely
with support from Hispanic church leaders in Southern California.
Holland, a founding member of HABBM's
board of directors, coordinated efforts with several other organizations to
produce regional directories of Hispanic Protestant denominations and churches
in South Florida (fieldwork
by missionaries of WorldTeam and published by WT in
1983), Southern
California (fieldwork by Lou Cordova, a staff member of the
institute of Latin American Studies at the U.S. Center
for World Mission in Pasadena, CA, and published in May 1986 by the Hispanic
Association for Theological Education, AHET), and the San Francisco Bay Area
(fieldwork by Stewart Stout, a missionary on furlough with the Latin America
Mission; published by PROLADES in 1988) .
During the 1990s, Holland returned to the
Los Angeles area to coordinate "A Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity
in the Greater Los Angeles Metro Area (GLAMA)," with the logistical
support of a dozen partnership agencies (1990-1997). He established an
office in Pasadena on the campus of the U.S. Center
for World Mission for himself and his research team, most of whom
were loaned to PROLADES by other missions and service agencies. Also, Holland
became an active member of the Hispanic
Association of Theological Education (AHET, Asociación
Hispana de Educación Teológica) and participated in the AHET History Committee
under the direction of the Rev. Dr. Rodelo Wilson. He
served as the project manager for the production of a 224-page compendium of
articles on the history of a dozen Protestant denominations with Hispanic
ministry in Southern California. Some of the original articles that were
considered for publication had been written by students in Holland's FTS-School
of Theology course on the "History of the Hispanic Protestant Church in
Southern California" during 1980-1981. However, since these earlier
articles had been written about ten years previously, the History Committee
decided ask each author to update them or to invite other Hispanic leaders to
write new articles about their respective denominations. Consequently, some of the articles published
by the AHET History Committee in 1993 were updated versions of the original
1980-1981 documents, while others were newly written. See the following website for the online
version of the AHET History compendium: /a>
Also, during 1992-1993, Holland and his
research team in Pasadena were able conduct a preliminary study of Hispanic
Protestant denominations in the USA and produce a series of documents, which
were presented to the board of directors of HABBM in Santa Ana, CA, on
October 13, 1993
in fulfilment of our contract with HABBM, which provided
us with a small grant for this undertaking. It was not until the mid-2000s that
Holland was able to process some of this information and make it available on
his old IDEA Ministries website (no longer active).
Now, with the creation of our new website at www.prolades.com,
some of these documents are available here:
http://national_hisp_study_93.htm
Holland returned to his home in Costa Rica
in 1997 to continue his work with PROLADES in Latin America and the Caribbean,
while resuming his professional career as a Christian educator at the Evangelical University of the
Americas (UNELA) of which he is one of the founders (1982,
originally known as the Missiological
Institute of the Americas, IMDELA - Holland was the Executive
Director from 1982-1990; IMDELA became an accredited private university in
1997). Between 1997 and 2007, Holland was a member of the faculty and
taught Master's level courses in missiology, church history, urban ministry and
the social sciences; he also served on UNELA's board of directors, most of the
time as its president. After Holland resigned from UNELA in 2007, he
resumed full-time his work in research and information management as Director
of PROLADES, while writing and editing a series of publications. Between 1999
and 2012, Holland designed, developed and managed a half-dozen websites with
technical support from IT colleagues in Southern California and Lima, Peru.
Holland was a major contributor to several encyclopedias
published during the 2000s, including Religions
of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs
and Practices (Drs. J. Gordon Melton and
Martin Baumann, editors; Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO - first edition in four
volumes, published in 2002; second edition in six volumes, published in 2010).
Currently, Holland is completing the editing of his own "Encyclopedia of Religion in Latin America and the
Caribbean," in both English and Spanish (four volumes, about 2,500 pages),
which is scheduled for completion in December 2012.
After years of thinking about the
possibility of resuming his work on a national study of Hispanic Protestant
ministry in the USA, Holland was able to do so in late 2009 after completing
work on the second edition of Religions
of the World. He consulted with more than a dozen Hispanic
church leaders in the USA, many of whom were former colleagues, before formally
launching a new national study on the Hispanic Protestant movement in the USA.
Thanks to the Internet and help from his research assistants in Costa
Rica, Holland began to create a national computerized database of Protestant
denominations with Hispanic ministry in the USA, as well as a database of local
Hispanic churches, along with the production of hundreds of webpages and
documents of information on the Hispanic Protestant Church in the USA. All
of these databases and informational resources are now available on this
website for Hispanic USA.
While attending the dedication ceremonies
for the new Dr. Justo L. González Center for Latino/Latina Ministry ( http://aeth.info/en/centro-de-recursos-justo-y-catherine-gonzalez ) in Orlando, FL, in October 2011, sponsored
by the Association for
Hispanic Theological Education (AETH, Asociación para
la Educación Teológica Hispana), Holland began to discuss with
AETH leaders the possibility of expanding his research and information
gathering to include a study of Hispanic ministry in the Dominion of Canada and the
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. This resulted in the
establishment of a partnership agreement between AETH & PROLADES, which
provided Holland and the PROLADES Team in Costa Rica with needed funding to
conduct these additional studies that were begun in November 2011 and completed
in late August 2012. The results of these three studies are now available on
this website above.
As of 31 August 2012, AETH became the
legal owner of these informational resources and is currently in process of
creating its own
AETH-PROLADES PARTNERSHIP WEBSITE to house the ONLINE HANDBOOK for the three
associated studies of Hispanic
Protestant Churches in the USA, Puerto Rico and Canada. After the new AETH
website is operational, this website will be discontinued.
Please address any further correspondence about these studies to Dr. Fernando A. Cascante, Executive
Director of AETH, at the address below.