FROM THE PRESIDENT

Dear Friends:

I have been reflecting upon the experience that our faculty had in January as we journeyed to Nicaragua and Costa Rica. We learned so much about the hopes and dreams of pastors, leaders, and teachers in both countries. We were warmly received and richly blessed by all whom we encountered. We certainly came away feeling grateful for how American Baptist mission dollars are being invested. Stan Slade from International Ministries accompanied us and was a wonderful teacher, excellent translator, and exciting communicator of the Gospel.

Since returning to Berkeley I have been thinking about the mission behind the mission. We discovered exciting points of solidarity with leaders in Costa Rica and Nicaragua because we are all part of a larger mission that drives our particular work. Our specific mission as a seminary is made possible and empowered by our participation in a larger mission. Our mission is based on the mission of the Nazarene named Jesus who taught, healed, died, and was resurrected.

At the center of our mission is the reality of community. To fulfill our mission in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Costa Rica and Nicaragua means the formation of a community of learners here who are part of the new human community created in response to the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are not independent entrepreneurs seeking skills but men and women who have common cause in Jesus and therefore seek to be trained in light of a larger commitment to a historical community of faith — the church. We are a company of believers who answer the call, engage, reflect, and preach the good news together. Our hope is to create a community of lifelong learning that is composed of students, faculty, staff, graduates, pastors, prophets, and friends.

In order to honor this larger mission we seek to be radically inclusive. Just as Jesus invited the lame, the lepers, and the poor to receive the Good News, we must make room for the left out, the passed over, and the underrepresented. We seek to be a place for women, the poor, the marginal, and those excluded from traditional theological education. We experienced this radical inclusiveness in both Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

The mission behind the mission requires advocacy for the poor. The seminary’s mission will be judged by whether our own work and the efforts of our graduates result in good news for the poor. In the economy of the reign of God, if the poor do not receive good news, no one does. Gustavo Paragon, the Nicaraguan pastor and leader, spoke about how the “avalanche” from the North was creating devastating poverty in the South. Our larger commitment requires not only compassion for the poor but also advocacy to confront the principalities and powers that make and keep people poor. We must confront our own complicity as North American Christians in the suffering of our sisters and brothers in Central America and elsewhere. Neither can we participate with those who are exporting theologies like “the prosperity gospel to the third world in hopes of justifying our own lifestyles and commitments”.

Our larger mission requires our work to be set in an eschatological context with liberation as the expected end. Our task is, as Paul puts it, to “see what is unseen for what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal” (II Cor. 4:18). We must learn to look beyond the now to the not yet so as not to miss the beckon of the new thing that God is doing. Leaders need to develop the gifts of interpreting the power of the new to the people they serve. Nicaraguan and Costa Rican leaders helped us to understand that the expected result of this eschatological urgency is not simply the growth of the church but the reconstruction of all human society. We who work in the church do so with liberation as a goal — the transformation of humanity, creation, and time. We cannot settle for “churchianity.” The development of the church is not our goal but rather a means to accomplishing that larger mission of liberation. To hope for less is to trivialize the power of the cross and to undercut the intent of the resurrection.

I am excited about how God is working here and in Central America. May God help us to hold hands with our brothers and sisters in Central America as we seek to develop and implement our vision as a seminary.

Faithfully yours,

Keith A. Russell
President