René Padilla, in 2019. / Video capture of Fundación Kairos. 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 PhD 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