In late November through the second week of December of 2009, McCormick Theological Seminary hosted the Rev. Alice Winters during a visit to the United States that included a number of teaching and speaking engagements at Chicago area churches. Winters is one of the leading biblical scholars and pioneers in theological education in all of Latin America and is the former President of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Colombia (she was the first woman to lead a seminary in Latin America), now a part of the larger Reformed University.
McCormick’s connections with Columbia and the Reformed University there have multiplied in recent years. Three recent alumni/ae serve on the university’s faculty – Milciades Pua (M.A.T.S., Class of 2005), Adelaida Jimenez (M.T.S., Class of 2009), and Milton Mejia (M.T.S., Class of 2009). The Rev. Richard Williams (M.Div., Class of 2005) and the Rev. Mamie Broadhurst (M.Div., Class of 2005) are missionaries in Columbia and Sarah Henken (M.Div., Class of 2008) works for the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and its accompaniment program for Columbia.
In order to understand the growth of Reformed theological education in Columbia and the present landscape in which McCormick alumni/ae serve, it is necessary to know something about Winters’ work beginning in the late 1970s. Winters is that unique combination of activist, educator and administrator, whose vision for making the Gospel known in Columbia and neighboring countries has in some way touched nearly every Presbyterian church leader now serving in that region.
An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Winters grew up in the Free Methodist Church before breaking with its theology and finding a home at Sixth Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., where she was ultimately ordained and had first developed her passion for ministries of justice and reconciliation through participating in the church’s outreach to people struggling in the inner city.
“It was there at Sixth Presbyterian,” she said, “that I decided that I wanted not only my evenings and weekends but also my eight hours a day to count for the Kingdom of God.”
While attending Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Winters studied for a year at the Latin American Biblical Seminary in Costa Rica. There she connected her experience at Sixth Presbyterian to the “revolutionary dimensions of the Gospel” as a theological imperative in the struggle against poverty, injustice, and oppression.
Upon graduation from seminary, Winters was given the opportunity to travel to Colombia in 1977 to direct a program of leadership training among rural pastors in the jungle wilderness of northwest Colombia, incorporating health, agriculture, and community development into theological education. There was no Reformed seminary for the region – people were going to Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica – and there was certainly a need for basic theological education.
“In that area the church was growing very rapidly,” she recalls. “The jungle was being cut down much like the Westward expansion in the United States as people began developing crops. Colombians have a very spontaneous way of sharing the Gospel. Colombians know their Bible and very quickly will begin Bible studies and small congregations.
“One of the first things I had to do when I arrived there was baptize a lot of people who had been brought to the Lord by these vivacious Colombian witnesses. Many of these witnesses and their converts had taught themselves to read in order to understand the Bible, and so we formed a Bible Institute to help in their development.”
Even though the Presbyterian Theological Seminary was established five years later in Baranquilla, Colombia, the Institute exists to this day because it requires less education from its incoming students and serves a somewhat different population. It has partnered with a local, evangelical Catholic group that provides secondary education and can serve as a stepping stone to seminary.
Winters helped establish the seminary in 1982 with Reformed partners in Venezuela and Ecuador in a time when traveling by bus from one country to another was relatively easy and commonplace. Now, 25,000 guarded troops line the border between Colombia and Venezuela, which has since established its own seminary.
After serving for four years on the seminary’s faculty beginning in 1983, Winters was named president and took on the rather daunting tasks of managing the institution’s budget and promoting its interests throughout Latin America – in addition to serving as the only full-time Bible scholar on the faculty. Meeting the demands for Biblical instruction in Colombia is not quite the same as it is in the United States, she points out.
“There’s a very interesting phenomenon in Latin America. People will take anywhere from a week to a month off of work to study the Bible intensively morning, afternoon, and evening. Because of our ecumenical connections and reputation for biblical scholarship, we had people from every denomination attend our program. And when they weren’t coming here, we would be going there. I believe I went to every country in Latin America except for Paraguay and Honduras.”
While theological education was in demand, a great roadblock was finally lifted in 1991, when under the newly established freedom of religion in Colombia, the IPC could work toward becoming a fully accredited institution.
“Until then, our students could get jobs at churches, but that was about it,” Winters said. “And many of the churches couldn’t really afford to pay a decent salary, so graduates had to find work somewhere else. Just imagine studying for five years and having nothing to show for it. We were anxious to gain accreditation and expand students’ vocational opportunities.”
Long before the IPC grew into a full-fledged university, its leaders were conscious of the cultural changes ahead and began using the name, Reformed University (in formation) – “in order not to offend the Colombian government” – until its course of studies was officially recognized in 2002. The University, of which the former IPC is now the School of Theology, offers programs that essentially condense college-level and graduate-level curriculum into a comprehensive five-year course of studies. So whether someone is enrolled in the School of Theology or the School of Business, he or she will be expected to take courses in psychology, music, sociology and other disciplines.
“That goes for courses in theology too,” Winters explains. “Many people enrolled in our other schools have no particular theology, and so we have what is called the Reformed Chair, and everyone must take courses there.
“We emphasize that we’re not proselytizing, because most of them have never had any contact with a Christian tradition other than the Catholic Church, and many have not been impressed with the Catholic Church. We tell them that ‘Reformed’ means you don’t swallow everything someone tells you. We’re here to teach people to think. That’s why we can work as an ecumenical institution: We don’t care so much what your answer is; we care that you can sustain it well.”
Race and gender studies are among the growing edges at the Reformed University, and they have been born out of the necessity to offer a just, critical perspective on the experiences of a growing number of the school’s very own students. Traditional attitudes toward women, their role in society and in scripture are changing, and there is a growing awareness of the plight of Afro-Colombians on the country’s Caribbean coast.
“There is still so much racial prejudice,” Winters says. “I remember taking a taxi one day and the coffee-colored driver was wearing a long sleeve shirt in the sweltering heat of summer. I come to learn that he is terrified that exposure to the sun will make his skin darker and that he will be confused with “the blacks,” or Afro-Colombians. Likewise, I’ve had people say to me, ‘If God loves me so much, then why did he make my skin dark?’ We’re working very hard at this issue and in the process of introducing Latin American Black Theology into the curriculum, we are beginning to see some students take pride in who God created them to be.”
What many don’t know about Alice Winters is that before even going to seminary, she earned a degree at the University of Michigan Law School and worked as a tax law specialist for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C. Her vocation took a very different tack as a result of her experience at Sixth Presbyterian Church more than 30 years ago, and so she is not particularly inclined to reflect on her background in law. However, when asked how she might compare the Alice Winters of her Free Methodist Youth with the Alice Winters of today, she takes a page out of her law school days and the distinction between Common Law (the cumulative force of legal tradition) and Statutory Law (that which has been codified by legislature) to characterize her spiritual development.
“I was taught to read scripture in conservative churches in the coded way, but the people of Latin America taught me how to read the Bible in the context of people’s realities. When you take seriously and enter into the present circumstances of people’s lives, you begin to understand God’s presence and God’s redemptive work in the world through Jesus Christ in new ways.
“I like to tell people that I did my final post-graduate work in the jungles and on the streets of Columbia with the poor people of Latin America. They have educated me in ways no one else could.”