Despite modernity's continual challenges of urbanisation, industrialisation and Marxist influence, a resurgent Ecuadorian Christianity (Catholic, Protestant and Pentecostal), with its many problems and evident human shortcomings, persists in the twenty-first century. The picturesque Andean Republic of Ecuador, about the size of Italy, is nestled in the north-west of South America. It is home to various ethnic groups of indígenas (Indigenous groups), mestizos (people of mixed Indian and European descent), mulatos (people of mixed African and European descent) and blancos (whites of European descent), while more recent immigrants originate from other countries, including Lebanon, China, South Korea, Japan, Italy and Germany.

Some Ecuadorians resist ‘modernity’ as viable for the country's and people's best interests. Quichua activist and thinker Ariruma Kowii from Otavalo argues for a view of the world from an Indigenous (Andean Quichua) perspective, where ‘complementary dualisms’ coexist without negation, unlike modern categories of knowledge. Such a shift alters the view of life, community, society and the world from perceiving it only through Western lenses. Former President of Ecuador Osvaldo Hurtado (1981–4), in Las costumbres de los Ecuatorianos (The Customs of Ecuadorians), provides a cultural analysis of reasons why Ecuador has not been able to develop the legal, institutional, political, economic and entrepreneurial foundations necessary to create general well-being.

This essay presents Ecuadorian Christianity specifically, and Latin American Christianity in general, couched within modernity yet critical of its paradigm of development and progression, with an emphasis on coexistence and dialogue. The renascent Christianity in Ecuador is explored in three ways: as redefining its identity; as a prophetic movement to the poor; and as the Pentecostalisation of the church.

Identity

In 1925, over a century after Ecuador's independence from Spanish rule (24 May 1822) and within a process of industrialisation, the Republic took its first steps towards a centralist model of the state. Politically a move beyond both the rigid conservative and theocratic government of Gabriel Garcia Moreno (1860–75) and the radical liberal era ushered in by General Eloy Alfaro (1895–1901 and 1906–11), the new model was solidified in the governments at the end of the 1960s and 1970s. It fostered social diversification and the inclusion of other religious expressions in Ecuadorian society.