Puerto Rico as both object and subject of mission

Some of us read denominational histories the way others read memoirs. We are tremendously curious to learn how institutions developed, and the more granular the better. José David Rodríguez’s Caribbean Lutherans: The History of the Church in Puerto Rico does not disappoint. It will sit on my shelves alongside other influential denominational histories like E. Clifford Nelson’s The Lutheran Church among Norwegian Americans and Early Lutheran Activities in the Ozarks by Homer A. Stevens.

Denominational histories are, by their very nature, somewhat programmatic. Historians start by looking at the recorded history of the mission. Missionaries often create the most records because the nature of their work necessitates reporting progress back to their funding sources. Yet Idalia Negrón, currently the bishop of the Caribbean Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, reports in her foreword to the book that when she and Rodríguez visited the Historical Archive of Puerto Rico to research how the Lutheran mission began there, they could find no information. Rodríguez’s book is a very real witness to persistence in recovering the history of the church he loves.

Rodríguez writes “from the experience of being missionized,” but he is aware that he holds a dual identity that theologian Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi describes as being both “the object and subject of mission.” As Luis Rivera-Pagán highlights in the book’s afterword, Puerto Rico is the world’s oldest colony, and Rodríguez employs a decolonial methodology. There were moments prior to the 19th century—Rodríguez calls them incursions—when Lutherans (including Lutheran corsairs and Bible smugglers!) were present in the West Indies. Lutherans from the United States began their mission in Puerto Rico in 1899, shortly after the US took control of Puerto Rico from Spain. A shift toward Protestantism followed because, as Rodríguez notes, “coloniality has traditionally designed a religious perspective.”