Portland pastor arrested on suspicion of rape
[..]Wednesday, October 17, 2007
WADE NKRUMAHPortland police have arrested the 38-year-old pastor of a Northeast Portland church on accusations that he raped or sexually abused eight women at Father’s House, a church ministering to Portland’s Spanish-speaking population.
Sergio Alvarizares was arrested Monday at his home in Ridgefield, Wash., as part of a two-week investigation that started when officers responded to a disturbance call at Father’s House, 1725 Northeast Alberta St.
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Northeast precinct officers arriving at Father’s House on Sept. 30 learned that several members of the church had confronted Alvarizares about allegations of improper sexual contact. Later that night, six women reported sexual assault to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. During the investigation, police identified two more victims.
Alvarizares is facing one count of first-degree rape, two counts of first-degree attempted rape and 10 counts of first-degree sex abuse.
Schmautz said other than Alvarizares’ association with the church and the accusations, police know little about his background.
He has been quoted a number of times on issues of concern to the Latino community. In May 2006, he spoke about how some workers feared to march in demonstrations against a crack-down on immigrants.
“I talked to my congregation on Sunday,” Alvarizares said. “There were some who were intimidated by employers and afraid to leave their jobs.”
The church Web site, www.casadelpadre.com, says Alvarizares is founder and pastor of the international ministry El Shaddai in Portland and of El Shaddai churches of the Northwest U.S. and is now pastor general of the international ministry Casa del Padre Inc.
There are 1,268 congregations worldwide in a network called Red Apostolica & Profetica Mundial CDP, the Web site says, including in the U.S., Mexico, Central and South America, Cuba and India.
The Web site says Alvarizares is from Guatemala. His wife, Mayra, is listed as a pastor on the Web site.
In 2002, Alvarizares was senior pastor at Mission International El Shaddai on Northeast Sandy Boulevard. That year, he was part of a church group that planned to go to Cuba and Colombia to train church leaders and to visit Ecuador for a leadership conference.
The investigation continues. Police request anyone with information call Detective Jeff Sharp at 503-823-0453.
Wade Nkrumah: 503-294-7627; wadenkrumah@ news.oregonian.com
Casa Del Padre list one of their primary beliefs as ‘”If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it, and if one part is honored, all the parts are glad. (1 Corinthians 12:26 NLT)” Maybe this is a way of making every church member suffer?
This arrest is slightly different than other evangelical sex offence arrests, being as it is a Latino fundy pastor accused, rather than some redneck, boondocks self-ordained nutjob ‘reverend’. But it’s the fundy bit that’s important. And Alvarizes is no ordinary fundy.
Evangelical charismatic churches are steamrollering their way throughout South and Central America Casa Del Padre has churches all over North and South America and is firmly in the vanguard of the Latino fundy wave, both in the US and abroad.
Latin America is undergoing what David Stoll, author of Is Latin America Turning Protestant? calls a new Protestant Reformation.
Nowhere is this so evident as in Central America, where in the last 15 years fundamentalist Christianity has spread with prairie-fire speed. In Guatemala a third of the population are evangelicos, or non-Catholics. And 10 to 15 per cent of Salvadorians, Hondurans and Nicaraguans now belong to the evangelical community, which is expanding three times faster than the population.
The Catholic hierarchy in the region calls it “the invasion of the sects” and places the blame squarely on the United States. The Honduran bishops accuse the CIA of covertly financing evangelical growth and the Guatemalan church hierarchy brands the evangelical movement an imperialist conspiracy to block revolutionary change and maintain US political and economic dominance.
Casa Del Padre also works in concert with other evangelical, charismatic churches that specifically aim to convert Moslems to Christianity:
Ministry History
In 1997 a missionary from Costa Rica joined Global Teams, followed by another in 1999. Both have been working in a Muslim country since that time. In 2001 Global Teams was invited by several Costa Rican churches to hold a mission conference aimed at recruiting missionaries and mobilizing churches. Four new missionaries joined Global Teams as a result and went to the Muslim world to explore long term service in 2002. Global Teams works closely with La Casa Del Padre (House of the Father), partnering to build a bridge for Costa Ricans to the unreached, especially in the Muslim world.
They also have churches in Costa Rica and El Salvador in partnership with “Red Apostolica & Profetica Mundial CDP” including in the USA, Mexico, Cuba and India.
It’s big business. This isn’t just another fundy: this is the hispanic James Dobson.
These hispanic evangelical churches are in the forefront of pushing US protestant hegemony in South and Central America and they’ve worked hand in glove with the Republican religious right to further their political aims.
But political campaigns are merely the respectable side of religious revolution in Guatemala. Numerous evangelical groups co-operated with the military in its bloody counter-insurgency war begun during the Rios Montt regime. Groups like the US-based Youth with a Mission and Christian Broadcasting Network joined with the Reagan Administration to support Rios Montt’s crusade to mop up leftist insurgents. These evangelicos worked closely with the military to establish ‘model villages’ on the ashes of Indian communities destroyed by Rios Montt’s legions.
The bloody counter-insurgency campaign razed over 400 Indian villages in the early 1980s. But it still failed to eliminate the insurgents – most of whom were poor Indian peasants. The transition from military to civilian rule in 1986 temporarily raised popular hopes for peace and improved socio-economic conditions. But the army never lost power and human rights abuses are again on the rise.
The battle for the beautiful north-western highlands of Guatemala has prompted the most intensive co-operation between the military and the fundamentalist right. In its ‘Operation Whole Armor,’ Bible Literature International claims to have distributed over 70,000 Bibles to Guatemalan soldiers and paramilitary patrols. The Summer Institute for Linguistics pitches in with interpretation services for the army’s civil-affairs and psychological operations teams. Others sponsor food distribution and educational programs in contested areas.
It is not hard to find evidence linking the explosion of evangelical churches – mostly the Assemblies of God church or highly emotional neo-pentecostal sects – with Washington and right-wing forces right across the region. The campaign to overturn the Sandinistas in Nicaragua attracted a stream of US evanglicals to the contra camps on the Honduran border. They passed out Bibles and supplies shipped to Central America on US military aircraft and banana boats.
Politics is also behind the hand-out programs that US evangelicals sponsor in many Honduran communities. Alan Dansforth, the US director of World Gospel Outreach, explained that food hand-outs are used as a bait to attract poor families to church services. He said that evangelicalism ‘can be a powerful tool to head communism off at the pass’. In El Salvador US missionaries are regularly invited to deliver anti-communist sermons on military bases. The right-wing Paralife International recently sponsored the tour of a Vietnam veteran who told Salvadoran troops that killing in the fight against the communist Anti-Christ was the ‘duty of every Christian’.
I’v a feeling this rape arrest is likely to be the tip of an iceberg for Casa Del Padre.
