Philip Jenkins, in his books The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South and The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,  has argued that the future of Christianity is in the Third World. For the people of that world, the Bible is not an ancient book to be demythologized and reinterpreted, but fits exactly with how they experience a world: ruled by demons and illness and oppressors, from which the power of God can deliver them. The Filipino priest  Fernando Suarez said that when he was a teenager he discovered that when he prayed for people they were healed (gracias to New Oxford Review).  In Canada, he was called to the hospital for a dying woman. 

 A Canadian woman declared dead eight hours earlier, her organs ready to be harvested and donated, suddenly opened her eyes after Filipino priest Fr. Fernando Suarez prayed over her.    

In his ministry, Suarez has a quiet approach: 

Suarez goes about it gently, in his own soothing way, touching, praying over people, pleading for healing. And because he wants everything centered in the Eucharist, he always begins with a Holy Mass.   

 According to witnesses, things happen when Suarez prays: 

Businessman Greg Monteclaro of Couples for Christ-Gawad Kalinga has seen it all. “Except the raising of the dead,” he says. “But the deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk — all that is told in the Bible — I have seen it happen.”    

 

“All that is told in the Bible”  – seems to hold much more sway in the Third World than in the First World. Perhaps this helps explain the vehemence of the objections coming from the Third World Anglicans, especially Africans, towards the Episcopal Church which seems to set aside the authority – and therefore the power – of the Bible.

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