This book can be situated within a new stream of studies on the history of Christianity in Latin America. In recent years, the works of Ricardo Ramacciotti, Stephen Andes and Julia Young have expanded scholarly understanding of Latin American Catholicism beyond the allure of liberation theology by examining the rise of Catholic activism and social thought since the late nineteenth century. However, apart from the monographs of Daniel Salinas and Carlos Mondragón, Evangelical varieties of social Christianity have attracted little attention in the Anglophone world. David Kirkpatrick's A gospel for the poor is a timely remedy. It concentrates on a group of young Spanish-speaking Evangelicals who, in the 1960s and ’70s, sought to carve out a ‘third path’ in missionary theology amidst the conservative loyalties of foreign missionaries and the radicalisation of progressive Catholics. Moving away from an older Protestant tradition that spoke of the social ‘implications’ of the Gospel, a generation of theologians including René Padilla, Samuel Escobar, Pedro Arana and Orlando Costas conceived social justice and service as ‘dimensions’ of the missionary endeavour, inseparable from evangelisation. For them, the Protestant missionary enterprise should be stripped of its white, Anglophone, middle-class prejudices in order to address the realities of disparate social contexts characterised by poverty and oppression. Their missiological alternative came to be known as ‘integral mission’ and this book examines how it emerged and influenced global Evangelical discourse.

Based on a rich collection of personal papers, correspondence and interviews, Kirkpatrick reconstructed the trajectories of these Latin American Evangelicals. Padilla, Escobar and their fellows projected their careers by means of a complex web of Evangelical institutions and congresses. They moved through the circuits of student organisations acting as travelling secretaries for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students and the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. This experience familiarised them with the realities of different Latin American countries and the radicalisation of student movements. But besides this they also engaged in a ‘multidirectional conversation’ with Evangelical leaders across the world, marketing their brand of social Christianity through a series of regional and global conferences. One of their most important platforms was the Lausanne Congress of 1974. Padilla and Escobar challenged the apparent dichotomy between social responsibility and evangelisation in their keynote lectures, calling for a comprehensive view of salvation that covered all aspects of human life. Of course, their conception of Christian mission divided opinions. But even though Padilla gazed at the frowning faces of some of his listeners as he spoke, integral mission found acceptance amongst a growing coalition of progressive Evangelicals in Africa, Asia, Britain and the United States.

A substantial part of the book is dedicated to showing how this small group of Latin American Evangelicals managed to export their missiological discourse to the wider world. ‘Integral mission’ has been deployed by a vast number of relief agencies and NGOs, as well as American mega-church pastors and left-leaning Evangelicals. Kirkpatrick shows that pre-existing publishing networks established by Brethren missionaries in Latin America propelled these theological conceptions. Catharine Feser Padilla, René's American wife and a seriously dedicated missionary, straddled linguistic barriers and helped to propagate integral mission globally. As Padilla and Escobar became increasingly unsatisfied with the direction of the Lausanne movement, they drew nearer like-minded African and Asian theologians through the frameworks of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians and the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. Significantly, they engaged in fruitful interactions with leading English-speaking Evangelicals and influenced John Stott's ‘conversion’ to social Christianity.

This book's protagonists had solid Evangelical credentials. Padilla undertook his theological training at Wheaton College and Manchester University under F. F. Bruce, while Costas studied at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Illinois. The author shows that even though these men crossed theological boundaries and engaged in a lasting dialogue with radical theologians, they carefully guarded their Evangelical orthodoxy, upholding notions of biblical authority, leaving inerrancy behind and encouraging the missionary enterprise. What the generation of Padilla and Escobar shared with radical Catholics and Protestants associated with the World Council of Churches in Latin America was a context of accelerated social change, political authoritarianism and unrest. But their responses were strikingly different, stemming from conservative Evangelical theology and eschewing Marxist categories of class analysis. The book, however, suggests that experiments with social Christianity in Latin America were a novelty up until the 1960s. Carlos Mondragón has shown that at least since the interwar era a group of Evangelical ministers and writers including Jorge Howard, Alberto Rembao, Gonzalo Báez-Camargo and Erasmo Braga embraced the social gospel and exerted some influence over the generation of Padilla and Escobar. A wider reconstruction of Evangelical social action and discourse in Latin America would illuminate the intricacies and historical depth of such intellectual exchanges.

There are a few drawbacks amidst this monograph's many virtues. Its chronology is at times confusing. The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time, making it difficult to trace the order of events. The most challenging issue lies in the use of ideologically charged categories. Kirkpatrick constantly reminds readers that this is a story that crosses the boundaries between conservative and progressive, the Global North and the Global South, the left and the right, and yet all chapters are replete with such concepts. It is not clear whether he regards them as useful categories of analysis and there is not a thorough evaluation of their explanatory efficacy. Throughout the book we learn that this ‘Latin American evangelical left’ was theologically conservative albeit socially progressive. But given their rejection of the Marxist and guerrilla alternatives in the Latin American context, so alluring to student movements and radical political associations, it is unclear what kind of ‘left’ they represented and what political alternatives they stood for in that context. Nevertheless, David Kirkpatrick's first monograph is a valuable contribution to an important, yet overlooked history of Latin American Evangelical social action and discourse in the Cold War.