“Books change thoughts, and books can mobilise people.”
Benjamin Bravo is a pastor of a Peruvian Evangelical Church, as well as being part of the Executive Editorial Board of Ediciones Puma, a Langham-supported Christian publisher.
Early conviction for a generational problem
Benjamin was at university when he first realised Peru lacked contextual and local Christian literature. Resources were scarce, yet there was a growing desire for them!
After concluding his study, Benjamin became a youth leader, then went on to be a youth worker at the regional level of the Peruvian Evangelical Church, before moving from youth ministry to the pastoring of adults.
After he’d been in ministry for some time, Benjamin was invited to join the national Human Rights Commission of the Peruvian Evangelical Church. Benjamin shares, “This helped me to stay in touch with the context of our country, which made me concerned about how to respond to this reality of violence from within the Church and not be detached from that reality.”
In the early 1990’s, Benjamin did further university study, and while there joined the Association of University Evangelical Groups of Peru (AUEGP). He was given the task of being the secretary of literature. He explains, “It concerned producing literature that students could use to develop their ministerial work at the university.”
The role was a great fit, and eventually this work led him to join Ediciones Puma, a publisher that grew out of others in the AUEGP with the same conviction for contextual biblical resources for Peru.
Teaching the church to apply the bible to life
Benjamin says, “We realised there were very complicated problems that we wanted to address, but unfortunately, there was no literature that responded to our national context. The vast majority of books we had were printed books, translated in the United States, but they did not address the problem of violence we were experiencing at the time.”
So Ediciones Puma was born, with the mission to provide the tools that can enable the Church to respond to its context. However, a few major challenges were in their way. How did they find authors? Once they had books, how did they distribute them? And the biggest challenge of all was financial: how did they fund this ministry, especially as they got started?
This is where Langham Partnership came in.
Benjamin recalls, “Langham allowed us to have funds to help us produce the books. Books are complicated to produce, and they are expensive to produce. And so, financial support for the publication of some titles was essential in order to make that a reality. The other thing was participation in international events. International events are quite expensive, and Langham helped us finance our participation there.”
Once they had published several books, another challenge became in theological libraries being able to afford stocking them in their libraries; this was another barrier Langham could address through the Library Grants program.
Thanks to this support from Langham, Ediciones Puma has been operating for over 30 years. When they produce or publish literature, they consider how it aligns with their approach to give the church the tools to respond to the complicated context of Latin America.
Benjamin says, “In our country, we really need literature that can increasingly respond to this reality. I truly hope that others will also be impacted by literature, which helped me, which opened my eyes to see a reality and which can respond from the gospel to a Church that, increasingly, I see as being disconnected from its reality or looking at other problems and not looking at the problems that really afflict us.”
In Peru and throughout all of Latin America they have unique problems. There is wide-ranging injustice. There is huge inequality between rich and poor, corruption that is normalised and even institutionalised, gender inequality, and criminal violence. These issues feel embedded in their society and culture, impacting their government, their relationships with their neighbours and are even how people in churches treat one another.
Benjamin shares, “We are very happy that, as a publishing house, we have been able to influence the themes addressed by other publishers in Latin America. We have brothers and sisters abroad who tell us: Puma’s books are paving the way. Puma’s books are paving the way. And that makes us happy, it really makes us very happy that this is happening, but there is still a long way to go.”