wfn.org | Cuban seminary's cup runneth over

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Note #7126 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

16-April-2002
02144

Cuban seminary's cup runneth over

Ecumenical campus, once a virtual ghost town, now pulses with life

by Jerry L. Van Marter

MATANZAS, Cuba - The campus of Seminario Evangelico de Teologia (Evangelical Theological Seminary), high on a bluff overlooking this coastal city and its crystalline bay, is a bustling, crowded place these days.

Enrollment is approaching 250. The students - from more than a dozen different denominations, ranging from Episcopalians to Pentecostals - live in a newly constructed dormitory and study in a newly renovated library.

The seminary, founded by U.S. Presbyterians and Methodists in 1946, reached its nadir at the height of post-revolutionary, anti-Christian fervor in Cuba. At one point it had only eight students.

The Rev. Ofelia Ortega, the current principal of the seminary (the first woman ordained as a pastor by the Presbyterian Reformed Church in Cuba, in 1967), remembers those desperate days very well.
Surprisingly, she remembers them with fondness. "It was a wonderful time, because we relied wholly on God, not on dollars from somewhere," she says.

After Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba and installed a rigid communist government, Presbyterians in the country quietly moved from congregation-based Christian-education programs for children to a summer-camp program on the seminary grounds and on a farm the church had acquired near the mountain city of Santa Clara in the center of the island.

"It was easier for summer camps," says Ortega, the church's director of Christian education at the time, "because there was so much discrimination against Christians."

During the first summer camp at the Santa Clara farm, she recalls, "all we had to eat was tomato soup, and all we had to eat it with was forks; there were no spoons."

"Oh, it was a wonderful time," she laughs. "We don't want to lose those memories."

When the first camp opened in Matanzas, she says, "We only had food for the first meal. But in the middle of the night - 3 a.m. - a local farmer showed up with his truck, and it was full of food, so we ate all week. It was the miracle of the loaves and fishes, right here." 

While seminary enrollment declined to almost nil, the summer-camp program kept Christian education from disappearing altogether for Presbyterian children in Castro's Cuba. The government tried to shut down the Presbyterian camps in 1968. 

"We spent hours and hours just waiting outside the government offices to plead our case that this was not good for the revolution," Ortega recalls. "People said the government officials got tired of us, like the widow at the judge's door in the Bible, so they let the camps go on, only because the Presbyterians refused to accept 'No.'"

The seminary, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Cuba, barely hung on through the 1970s and '80s. Half of the Presbyterian pastors in Cuba fled in the years just after the revolution, and the seminary couldn't possibly replace them.

A turning point came at the start of the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That forced Soviet client states such as Cuba to take a fresh look at relations with institutions toward which they had been hostile. After a historic meeting with church leaders, Castro changed the Cuba's official status from "atheist" to "secular." For the church, everything changed.

"The growth of the church has been tremendous," Ortega says. "The government finally realized it needed the church to help develop the country - after decades of telling the church that it needed to address spiritual needs only, while the government took care of material and social matters."

The revived emphasis on the diaconal ministry has brought new vitality to the church and opened up exciting new opportunities for ministry, Ortega says.

"Now we can again teach our pastors that they cannot stay inside the church, preaching and teaching," she says. "They must now also stay inside the community, seeking development of all of life."

While the seminary strives to catch up with the burgeoning demand for pastors, it has opened five extension programs around the country to train lay leaders for the church. Countless cooperative programs also have been developed with partner institutions overseas, including the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Columbia Theological Seminary, of Decatur, GA.

The seminary's primary mission - to educate pastors for Cuban churches - hasn't changed, but Ortega says it has set a number of secondary goals, including:

* Developing contextual theologies, such as Black Cuban theology and feminist theology, to prepare students to address race and gender issues;

* Building on the seminary's ecumenical tradition, to help prepare students to function in a religiously diverse society;

* Addressing ecological concerns, to help Cuba protect and sustain its scarce natural resources;

* Participating more fully in civil society.

The seminary has developed cooperative programs with a nearby elementary school and an AIDS care center; has built a playground for the city of Matanzas; and recently got permission from the local government to convert an abandoned movie theater into a community center.

The church and the government are still learning to live together in this new relationship, Ortega says. "The Bible tells us to love our enemies," she says. "We see in the Bible a theology of relationships - to connect with all people."

That doesn't mean, she says, that the church must compromise on matters of faith.

"Our main commitment must be to serve the people of Cuba, not the government," she says. "If we do an effective job of serving the people, the government will see that we're acting on non-negotiable Christian ethical principles, and they will respect that.

"We must never say 'No' to dialogue, but sometimes we have to say 'No' on principle."

With full enrollment - the seminary now has a waiting list! - there is palpable hope in the rapidly growing Presbyterian Reformed Church in Cuba that it soon will have enough pastors to go around.

Ortega would like to build an endowment that would make it possible to raise professors' salaries - they now make about $20 a month, compared to the average Cuban salary of $12 a month. "Teaching here is sacrificial work," she says.

The seminary is also developing practical courses for students' spouses, in handicrafts and music as well as theology, and hopes to acquire a nearby farm where it could raise its own food and generate income.

Ortega is bursting with ideas, and her enthusiasm is contagious. 

"I love to be Cuban and I love to be Presbyterian," she says, "and most of all I love to be walking with God."
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