René Padilla, in 2019. (Screenshot: Fundación Kairos) Article continues below advertisement ↴ Carlos René Padilla, a very influential evangelical Latin American theologian, died at the age of 88 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Born in a humble family from Ecuador, René soon learned from his father and uncle about the vision of church planting in difficult contexts. At a young age, his family moved to Colombia. Although he later would attend college in the United States and earn a Ph.D. in New Testament in the UK, he worked most of his life in Latin America. Padilla was strongly involved in national evangelical student movements of the Comunidad Internacional de Estudiantes Evangélicos (in English, IFES), discipling and training young leaders in countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Perú and Ecuador.