Five distinctives of Latin America Mission:

 

 

1.Identification with the culture and the people.

Harry and Susan showed a deep sense of identification with the Latin American people and culture. The local newspaper was as important to them as their morning coffee, and they followed local politics avidly. They embraced local customs and concerns with genuine involvement and appreciation.  At one point, early in his career, Harry came under the conviction that as a highland Scot, he was perceived by the Argentines to be aloof and disinterested in them. He made it a matter of earnest prayer, and the Lord gave him a warmth and empathy that changed the quality of his relationships.  More important, this sense of Latin American identity re-quired them to know and understand thoroughly the local situation before embarking on any project-even an evangelistic campaign. Harry and Susan spent twelve full months, from January 1920to January 1921 (leaving their children with Christian friends in Kansas City), and traveled by ship, train, riverboat, bus, and frequently on horseback, getting to know intimately most of the countries of the continent before they felt free to establish their new mission.

 

This same characteristic caused them to place the headquarters in San Jose, Costa Rica, rather than in some city like Philadelphia or New York (both major areas of their economic support). In the campaigns he planned and conducted, Harry always insisted on securing an outstanding Latin American orator to be the crusade preacher and evangelist. His own role, he felt, should be backstage. In the next generation it was Kenneth Strachan who carried this principle to its fullest development in LAM, but it was the incarnational identification of his parents with the Latin American people and their culture that inspired him.

 

2. The priority of evangelization.

The mission was born in the heyday of Protestant liberalism in America.  But Kenneth Strachan emphasized the evangelistic campaign ministry after his father's death by initiating the Evangelism-in-Depth movement, thereby giving maximum expression to his parents' priorities.

Grace, in whom so many of her father's genes were evident, who became the visionary of human development, emulating her mother, working among marginalized women but discovering that true and complete development must seek first to bring those in need to the feet of the Savior.

 

3. Compassionate response to human need.

Nothing illustrates this quality better than the reaction of the Strachan’s to the miserable street urchins they encountered in San Jose. Ragged, dirty, and sickly, the street children begged, occasionally worked at selling newspapers or shining shoes, and more frequently resorted to theft and violence to secure a living. Susan wanted to do something about it immediately. Harry reminded her-and she agreed with him-that God had led them to Costa Rica to start a ministry of campaign evangelism, and until the Lord should lead them explicitly in other directions, they must not allow themselves to get diverted from this purpose.

So they carried the burden in their hearts and frequently made it a matter of prayer until finally, after leading them through the experience of starting a hospital and understanding better the needs of the Costa Rican waifs, God opened the way to establish a Bible home for children.

This led to the present-day Roblealto Program of Child Welfare, which has become a model ministry of wide and varied outreach and an important part of Costa Rica's social structure.  It is not hard to find other illustrations of this readiness to respond to obvious needs. The bold inauguration of an urban hospital when there were yet no evangelical doctors available.

 

4. Willingness to break new ground is an essential characteristic of LAM since its earliest days.

"Is there a better way of doing it?" This is a question Harry Strachan must have asked himself frequently. He was certainly quick to experiment with different methods and venues, traveling local trains back and forth to give out tracts and a word of witness, converting a horse-drawn coach a bookmobile, using tents and theaters instead of church auditoriums for campaigns, promoting them with marimba concerts and musical bands.

 

Before the Bible institute that Harry dreamed about could get started, Susan was already asking herself, "Where are the young men who come as students going to find missionary-minded wives to share their ministry?" And so she began a simple training school for Christian girls that eventually became the Bible institute of evangelists and pastors Harry had envisioned. Their Christian peers credited them with being" one step ahead," and this is indeed apt for these missionary innovators.

 

5. Personal passion for Christ.

The goal in life for Harry and Susan was to love, obey, and exhibit the person and gospel message of their Lord. In the long run, nothing else mattered.

Harry's early participation in and identification with the American Keswick movement demonstrated this focus. The Keswick movement was a summer-conference outgrowth in Great Britain of the Moody-Sankey campaigns of 1875. It appealed especially to evangelicals of Reformed theological persuasion and had come to be characterized by disciplined piety and missionary zeal. It quickly spread to America and other parts of the world.

This summary of the principles seen in the lives of Harry and Susan Strachan are taken from an article published in International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 1998, “The Legacy of Harry and Susan Strachan,” W Dayton Roberts