The church can demonstrate true compassion when it sees the Lord in the face of those who need Him, says the President of the Baptist Union of Chile.

In an address at the worldwide Baptist movement’s 400th anniversary celebrations, Raquel Contreras said winning other people for Christ could not be separated from a lifestyle of compassion.

Believers, she said, needed to go beyond reaction “to feel and live what others fee and live”.

“The identification is so real that we become one,” she said.

Ms Contreras went on to say that true compassion had to be permeated by the love of God.

She said the church had to practise compassion instead of putting it second place to administrative duties or theological considerations.

Churches, she added, needed to continue to demonstrate compassion even after people became committed Christians.

“People come to the church with problems,” she said. “When people come to our churches their problems become our problems.”

Ms Contreras called upon Baptists to adopt a lifestyle of compassion by demonstrating the same compassion to strangers as to their family in the home.

“We must consider compassion not as a social political action but as a lifestyle,” she said.

“Sometimes we think we have to do big things and belong to wonderful organisations that do wonderful things and we give money to them, we separate two weeks in our lives to do mission work.

“Even though that is very, very important that is not the only thing.

“We must do it (compassion) every day, walking in the streets of our countries and our cities.”

She concluded with a call to Baptists to show the same compassion to their neighbours as Christ would.

She said: “See our Lord in the face of those who need Him so much.”

The 400th anniversary celebrations conclude on Sunday evening with an address from the President of the Baptist World Alliance, the Rev David Coffey.

On Saturday, he and other Baptist leaders stood at the place where the first Baptists met to pray and study the Bible in the back room of an Amsterdam bakery. The group was led by Thomas Helwys and John Smyth, who fled persecution in England in 1609.