Buenos Dios! My trip to teach in the Yucatan was an amazing experience! The Theological Seminary of the Yucatan is a mission project of the South Korean Methodist Church and supported by Wesley Theological Seminary. The administrators of the seminary are Korean missionaries, an energetic husband and wife team who provided me with great hospitality. The seminary is located in Merida, a city of one million persons near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico at the top of the Yucatan. I lived in the seminary compound, which was a one-and-a-half story gated property in a working class neighborhood. I was there during the winter in southern Mexico so the temperature, while warm in the upper 80's, was very tolerable. Vivid flowers on the hanging vines in the courtyard of the seminary compound were fragrant and wonderful to view.
One small building in the compound serves as the classroom. These Mexican students study for three years from September to May. In the summer many of the students are employed to help with the work camps that come from churches every year. Each week of the seminary education is an intensive five-day study on a different biblical, theological or practical mission topic with a visiting professor as the teacher. The institution itself has no faculty; faculty come to Merida from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., The Methodist Church in South Korea, and the Methodist seminary in Mexico City, as well as qualified pastors.
I taught 13 Mexican graduate students from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day with the help of an excellent translator. I taught a Worship 2 course. My biggest difficulty was that they have no library and few resources. Their Spanish bibles are translations of out-of-date texts or paraphrases of Scripture. But they were eager and willing to learn and entertain new ideas. The students were Methodists, Presybterians, and Assemblies of God, and two students were non-denominational. They are accustomed to an evangelical style of worship, with the most formal worship being among the Presbyterians.
A wonderful lunch, cooked in the compound kitchen, was served from 2 to 3 p.m. After lunch I answered questions from students and then talked with the translator about the next day's class content. My day usually finished around 4 p.m. One day I went to the archeological museum, which is full of fabulous Mayan carved art, and then to study the 16th century Cathedral. Another day I went to Chichen Itza, one of the best Mayan sites in Mexico. The other days I took a much-needed nap. The Korean missionaries took me to see a wonderful production of Colonial street dancing in the downtown square the first night of teaching. They also took me to dinner in a local restaurant one night, and I took them and the translator and her husband to dinner on Thursday night. It was the tradition for the visiting Professor to buy the students and staff pizza for the last noon. The pizza, would you believe, came from Costco. The rest of the time at night I was in my room (no radio or tv and the compound closed down at dark) so I read Ken Follett's wonderful story The Pillars of the Earth.
The major issue in worship for these folk is their eternal struggle to differentiate themselves from the dominant Catholic church and its liturgies. I listened to exactly the same issues as the first time I went to Mexico in the 1960's. I think I was able to give them some "handles" by insisting on the strategy of the ecumenical Protestant churches who have bypassed the Catholic-Protestant polemics of the Reformation and beyond by looking to the New Testament and the first five hundred years of the church's life for their authority. We focused on the three achievements of ecumenism in the twentieth century: a common consensus on a three year Lectionary, a common ordo for Sunday worship (and the sacraments), and a common church calendar.
It was a wonderful week. The Methodist University of Kenya has sent an e-mail asking me to still consider teaching in Africa next year. Always happy to go, and glad to be home.
As a mission-focused, church-based seminary, Wesley Theological Seminary is dedicated to raising up and training leaders who transform the church and the world. We believe that this must happen not only in the United States, but in all countries. Creating and supporting seminaries and schools to train indigenous pastors in developing countries is one of many ways we fulfill this mission around the world; training leaders in Washington, DC through our Master of Divinity degree and through our dual degree program in International Peace and Conflict Resolution is another. If you would like to learn more about what Wesley is doing around the world or if you feel called to be part of that work, please contact Beth at bludlum@wesleyseminary.edu or (202) 885-8653. We look forward to hearing from you!
Dr. Diedra Kriewald is a retired professor at Wesley Theological Seminary. As a lifelong pastor and Christian Educator, she is passionate about equipping people to teach the Bible in life-altering and life-giving ways.