Architect of integral mission
Born in Quito, Ecuador, raised in poverty, converted as a child, Padilla studied at Wheaton and took his doctorate in New Testament at Manchester under F. F. Bruce. He spent his working life in Argentina, in student ministry with IFES and then in publishing.
He is remembered for one week in July 1974. At the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Padilla and his fellow Latin American Samuel Escobar told a largely Western congress that the gospel it was exporting had been shaped by American culture — individualism, consumption, anti-communist politics — and that a gospel which saved souls while ignoring hunger and injustice was not the gospel of the New Testament. The addresses were contentious. They also worked: the Lausanne Covenant that emerged includes a paragraph on Christian social responsibility that would not have been there otherwise, and John Stott, who chaired the drafting, publicly changed his position.
The Spanish phrase Padilla gave the church for this is misión integral — integral or holistic mission: evangelism and social action as two aspects of one obedience, not two competing programmes.