There’s no theological education pipeline anymore

I confess that I have two difficulties in writing about how my mind has changed. First, from early childhood I was taught that you should never speak about yourself. Indeed, if you did, people would comment, No tiene abuela (“He has no grandmother”), because it’s your grandmother who is supposed to talk about you, and it’s in bad taste to act as a grandmother to yourself. Second, having been shaped by a deeply Wesleyan piety, I find it hard to speak about how my mind has changed without at the same time speaking about how my heart has changed. For me, the two are entwined in such a way that they often are indistinguishable.

How, then, have my mind and heart changed? I could begin by remembering the time more than 60 years ago when I first felt called to the ministry. At that point I was convinced that I would be an evangelist, calling the thousands of people I saw in the slums in Havana to faith and salvation. Or I could begin a few years later, when I finished my seminary studies in Matanzas, Cuba, and the local Methodist church leaders sent me abroad for doctoral studies at Yale. At that point, I expected that eventually I would be a teacher in the same institution where I had received my early theological training. Or I could begin at a later date, when political conditions in Cuba and the failed CIA invasion made it impossible for me to return there, and I went to teach at the Evangelical Seminary of Puerto Rico. But the changes to my mind and heart at each of those points are so obvious that little would be gained by my surveying them.

Perhaps a better starting point is the crisis that led me to leave Puerto Rico and come to Atlanta to teach at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, a move that would eventually lead me to an entirely different career. I had originally gone to Puerto Rico with a Methodist grant that would support me there for only one year. Other grants from the Lilly Endowment made it possible for me to remain there for a total of eight years. Toward the end of that time, in the mid-1960s, there was a radical political polarization in Puerto Rico. This polarization reached deeply into the churches—and particularly into the seminary.