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Frontier
Mission Formation
at
the Seminary of the Southwest
Address by the Very Rev’d.
Titus Presler, Th.D., D.D.,
Dean & President, Professor of Mission and World Christianity,
Episcopal Theological Seminary
of the Southwest,
at the Annual Convention of the
Diocese of Western Kansas,
Salina, Kansas, Friday, 17 October 2003
Grace
to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ!
[singing:]
Kunyange zvorema, kunyange
zvorema,
Daidzai Jesu, ndiye mutungamiriri
wakanaka,
Daidzai Jesu, ndiye mutungamiriri
wakanaka!
This
song was being sung by about 20 people crowded into the living
room of Edward and Beatrice Mangwanda, Anglican Christians living
in the village of Chirarwe in the Diocese of Manicaland
in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe. It was a cold June evening just three years
ago — June is the depth of winter south of the Equator — and Jane
and I were back in Zimbabwe to lead a retreat for Episcopal missionaries
gathered from throughout Africa.
We
were visiting our old friends the Mangwandas, leaders in St. Gabriel’s
Church in Chirarwe, and they had gathered some of their friends
— and ours — from the congregation, one of 12 of which I was rector
in the 1980s. People began coming at 6 or 7, after dark.
There was a simple dinner of mealie porridge, meat and
vegetables in the dim light of solar-powered fluorescent lights,
and then the worship began.
Edward
Mangwanda, catechist of the congregation, was first to speak. He welcomed us, of course, but then, equally
of course, he preached. He
an elderly man now, but he preaches with what John Kennedy called
vim and vigah. And as he finished preaching he led a song,
and that was the song he sang:
[singing:]
Kunyange zvorema, kunyange
zvorema,
Daidzai Jesu, ndiye mutungamiriri
wakanaka,
Daidzai Jesu, ndiye mutungamiriri
wakanaka!
In
English, those words mean:
Though things are heavy, though
things are heavy (meaning, though life is hard),
Call upon Jesus,
he is a good leader,
Call upon Jesus, he is a good
leader!
Life
was very hard for Zimbabweans
at that moment, as it continues to be.
Black-white tensions were rising, the government was taking
a hard line, the economy was going downhill fast, inflation was
something like 100 percent a year, and they it was hard to make
ends meet. I know many
Shona songs and hymns, but I’d never heard this one before.
It was yet another new chorus that just seemed to come
up from the ground and into the lives of the people, and it was
helping them keep their eyes on Jesus the savior in their lives.
After
Edward’s sermon and song, another person stood up to preach, introducing
her sermon with a stirring song that brought people to their feet
for singing and dancing. And
so it went, with sermons, songs and prayers continuing until about
1 o’clock in the morning. That was a powerful experience of church, and
an experience of a powerful church: worshiping, witnessing, people
building one another up in the faith through preaching, praying
and encouraging. It’s a church on a frontier, in an isolated
place with few physical and financial resources.
Now
why do I tell you this story?
Yes, because I’ve been a missionary and because I have
lots of continuing engagement in the world church.
Yes, because I’m a professor of mission and world Christianity.
Yes, because I’d like to get you excited about what God
is doing in other parts of the world.
Mostly,
though, I tell you this story because you’re on a frontier here
in Western Kansas. This diocese is a hundred years old, just a
little younger than the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe. The Episcopal Church in Western Kansas does not have tremendous physical
and financial. Here, as
in Zimbabwe, it can be a challenge to
network as widely as you’d like, to muster the resources for the
staff and buildings and education materials that you need, or
to travel to be with other Christians in other places.
And so I tell you that story as a story of encouragement,
that in frontier places the church is alive, in frontier places
the church is vibrant, in frontier places the church is growing,
in frontier places the church has experiences and insights that
the church in more central places often lacks.
In
fact, my experience has often been that the church on the margins
has more vitality than the church at the center.
Let me move back to Manicaland for just a moment. In that diocese was rector of not simply one
congregation but of a church district that, altogether, had twelve
congregations when I left it.
It was called the Bonda Church District.
St. David’s Church at Bonda was established in 1908, not
by English missionaries but by local African catechists from another
place about 80 kilometers away. It was the center from which later missionaries
and catechists traveled into the further reaches of the highlands
to evangelize and start new congregations.
Now,
70 years later, Bonda was still a center, with a primary school,
a secondary school, a hospital and a religious order.
From that center I traveled to the outlying congregations
on rough roads, in one case having to hike several hours up
a mountains to get to the congregation.
There were daily liturgies at Bonda in the church and in
the various institutions. The
priest was there a lot of the time.
There was electricity and running water on the mission.
The outlying congregations were visited by the priest
once every month or couple of weeks.
No running water, no electricity.
Where was the vitality?
Out in the bush in the outlying congregations!
Our Sunday attendance from the village at Bonda might be
80 or 100. The Sunday attendance out in Chirarwe was 300,
at Zambe 400 or 500, and the services would last for hours!
This
morning I flew here from New York City. I was staying at the General Seminary, from
Bishop Adams and I graduated in the same class, and where he received
an honorary degree alongside Desmond Tutu last May. The Diocese of New York is mammoth. It has 201 congregations, more than any other
diocese. Some of its congregations
have annual budgets that exceed the endowments of entire dioceses. There’s music to die for in many of its churches.
Is the New York church more vital than the
church in Western Kansas? I don’t know
the answer to that, but I don’t assume anything, and I encourage
you not to assume anything. Now
what I’m not saying to you is, “Small is Beautiful!
Don’t worry. Your problems aren’t real!” What I am
saying is, “You’re here. God
is up to something here with you, just as God is up to something
in other places. God invites you into God’s mission. You have a sacred opportunity to discern what
that mission is here in Western Kansas.”
What
may be needed is mission formation for the frontier. I’m here to tell you that we at the Episcopal
Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin stand ready to assist you
with that frontier mission formation.
I’d like to talk with you a bit about what we’re up to
there and how we can be a resource for you.
In
late January, the first-year students of the Episcopal Theological
Seminary of the Southwest returned from what we call the January
Immersion in Multicultural Ministry.
Usually this several-week course is held at the Mexican-American Cultural Center in San Antonio, Texas, but this year the course
hit the road, with the students dividing into three van groups
for a variety of experiences in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, El Paso, Texas, and the city just across
the border from El Paso, Juarez, Mexico. They were away from their spouses and children.
They were led by two faculty members, Paul Barton, himself
a Mexican-American and the professor of Hispanic studies at ETSS,
and Javier Alanis, professor at our companion institution, the
Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest, which has been located
at ETSS for 25 years.
When
I asked the returning students how it went, I got responses like
these:
— “It
was a life-changing event for me.”
— “My
entire approach to spirituality and ministry has changed. It’s going to take me awhile to sort out how,
but what I do know is that I’m going to come out of this different
than I went in.”
— “I
was so touched as I talked with people
in Mexico
and with recent immigrants here.
I felt embraced by their openness.”
— “I’d
never really encountered poverty before, and what I saw in Juarez
left me reeling. Now I’m struggling with how the church in this
country can minister meaningfully among the poor and in the midst
of these global realities.”
This
vignette says a lot about what we’re up to at the Episcopal Theological
Seminary of the Southwest in Austin,
Texas.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk about that with
you. The Diocese of Western Kansas is a constituent
member diocese of the seminary and has two seats on the board,
one of which is filled by Sherri Denton and the other of which
was filled by the late Rev’d Mary Kay Bond, a graduate of the
seminary. Presently several alumni/ae
of ETSS serve in the Diocese of Western Kansas.
The
Multicultural Ministry Immersion Program says that ETSS prepares
people to participate in God’s mission in the world. ETSS understands that mission is ministry in
the dimension of difference, so to prepare people for mission
in the multicultural environment of the USA
and the global community in the 21st century, ETSS
takes people out of their comfort zones to experience ministry
across the divides of culture, race, ethnicity, language, economics,
education and geography. ETSS takes the Hispanic reality as a central
instance of that kind of mission, because Hispanics are now the
largest minority in the USA. In the multicultural century, multicultural
skills will be crucial for ministry through the Episcopal Church. The Hispanic focus both prepares people for
Hispanic ministry and equips people for multicultural ministry
wherever they are, which might mean with Caribbeans in Newark,
or Vietnamese in Little Rock, or Japanese in Denver.
ETSS
does this kind of education in innovative ways. In addition to the Multicultural Immersion,
students are involved with Austin Interfaith Organization, a community
organizing effort, throughout their first year. Second-year’s have an Urban Ministry Immersion
experience in Los Angeles
and Atlanta during
January.
All
of this is done ecumenically. Our partnership with the Lutheran Seminary Program
in the Southwest — LSPS, for short
— is an outstanding instance of the Lutheran-Episcopal
dialogue that has now issued in Called to Common Mission, the
shared communion between the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America.
Innovative
education at ETSS extends well beyond preparation for ordination.
We offer a Master of Arts in Pastoral Ministry specifically
for laypeople, and right now about 50 people are
enrolled. The Larry Maze
Endowment for Theological Education for the Laity is intended
to strengthen that program and the highly regarded Certificate
Program for Youth Ministry and Christian Education, in which people
participate in from all over the country during a week in January
and a week in June. This fall we have three on-line courses going
on in church history, spirituality, and Hispanic ministry. We’ve begun conversations with the bishops of
the 12 dioceses of this province, Province VII, about how ETSS
can strengthen continuing education for clergy and help prepare
Canon IX clergy. In all these ways, we seek to prepare people
for ministry, energize the church as a whole to participate in
God’s mission, and serve the people of Western Kansas
and this province.
Now,
I’m new to all this. I’m
fairly new to ETSS, having arrived there in June of last year. I’m new not only to Austin,
but to Texas, never
having spent any time there. And
I’m new to the southern regions of the United
States. I came to ETSS from Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where I was
rector of St. Peter’s Church for 11 years.
Never — I mean, never — did I imagine that I’d land in
Texas. My experience in Asia
and Africa has made me a bit of a global
citizen, but I was very parochial about New England
— “Move me to Burma,
move me to Tanzania,
but anywhere west of Massachusetts?!” It was the seminary’s commitment to mission
— and the Holy Spirit — that made moving to ETSS feel absolutely
natural, like just the right thing.
All of a sudden the question was not “Why?’ but “Why not?”
And it’s been a blessing for me and my family.
In
and from Cambridge,
I’d also been teaching in seminaries for a number of years, mission
studies at General, preaching at Harvard
Divinity School,
mission studies at Gaul
Theological College
in Harare, Zimbabwe,
and mission studies at the Episcopal Divinity School. I’m a missiologist, which means that I study
and teach the history, theology and practice of Christian mission,
with particular interest in the interaction of gospel and cultures. I’m married to the Rev’d Jane Butterfield, who
is Mission Personnel Director for the Episcopal Church, or, more
specifically, for the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. She has an office at ETSS as well as at the
Episcopal Church Center in New York
— so it’s great that the Church
Center now has a field
office in the heartland of Province VII! One of the fruits of that is the fact that the
winter training of outgoing Episcopal missionaries is now taking
place each January at ETSS, with a chronologically and ethnically
diverse group of mostly laypeople and some clergy, preparing to
do mission in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
With our four children, Jane and I served as missionaries
in Zimbabwe. Much earlier, I was born up and spent my first
18 years in India
as the child of missionaries.
For
me, serving the Church at ETSS brings together so many strands
of my experience: pastoring a community; celebrating the mysteries
of Christ, teaching mission and world Christianity, church-wide
networking, intellectual inquiry in conversation and research. It’s an exciting place to be. This year’s entering class and overall enrollment
are the largest ever. We’ve
completed an $8.7 million capital campaign for construction, renovation
and endowment — and exceeded the goal by $600,000.
We’re grateful to Episcopalians in Western Kansas
for participating in that campaign.
We’re about to complete the first three years of our new
curriculum. My major themes
in this early time for me are spirituality, leadership and mission. You’ve heard me on mission. In spirituality, I want to strengthen ETSS as
a place of spiritual pilgrimage, where students experience their
lives in Christ deepened and enriched.
We have a full schedule of daily worship on campus, and
this spring we’re having a Quiet Day for the entire community.
In leadership, I’d like to ensure that the ministers the
Church receives from ETSS are not only skilled in the pastoral
arts but know themselves and their gifts as leaders.
In
Abilene yesterday,
I was talking with two alumnae, Scott Mayer, rector of the Church
of the Heavenly Rest, and his associate, Rosemary Thomas, who
previously had served in Panama. Scott graduated from ETSS in 1992. “When I went to seminary from Dallas,”
he said, “my rector said to me, ‘You’re not going to learn how
to do something. You’re
going to become something.’ And I believed that,” Scott said. “I threw myself into that, and it worked.
ETSS came through for me. I became something new. I was truly formed, and it affects everything
I do, and how I do it, here in Abilene.”
That,
dear friends, is pilgrimage.
That
is formation for mission.
That
is the mission of theological education.
We’re
grateful for the opportunity to serve you in this diocese.
We’re grateful for the partnership we have with you in
building up the Church. And
we thank you for your prayers for us and for your students.
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