Boston Program Helps Hispanic Pastors
Build New Foundation for Ministry
Until a few years ago, the Rev. José Nora, assistant pastor at a predominately Hispanic congregation near Boston, knew very few other Hispanic pastors. Although the Hispanic population in the Boston area had increased dramatically over the past decade or so—bringing with it a concomitant explosion in Hispanic congregations—Nora rarely saw or spoke with his counterparts from other Hispanic churches.
While virtually all pastors experience some sense of isolation, few know it as deeply as do pastors in immigrant Latino communities. Most, like Nora, are bi—vocational pastors, working 40 hours and more a week at other jobs and pastoring on nights and weekends. Usually from evangelical and charismatic traditions, their congregations are typically very insular and often serve as self—contained outposts of emotional and spiritual support for churchgoers struggling to build new lives in a strange land. Busy trying to learn a new language and navigate a new culture, focused entirely on their own churches, many Hispanic and Latino pastors are cut off not only from the broader society but also from one another.
But in Boston, the Institute on Pastoral Excellence—a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project aimed at Hispanic pastors—is rapidly changing that dynamic. One of the program’s first graduates, Nora is now part of a vibrant and growing network—a community really—of Hispanic pastors from throughout the Boston area. They're learning basic skills of pastoral ministry from administration and planning to pastoral counseling. They're meeting together for fellowship and support. They're mentoring one another. They're preaching in each other’s churches. They're working together on community issues such as jobs, housing and immigration.
“When you have a lot of experienced pastors around you who share with each other and help each other, it can be very important and very helpful to your own ministry,” says Nora. “When you bring a group of pastors together, we can do a whole lot more together for the community than we can alone.”
What Nora has experienced through the Institute is perhaps best described in a single word, according to Yoxmar Rodriguez, director of the Institute. It’s called “church.”
“That’s really been our biggest accomplishment,” says Rodriguez. “We've helped these pastors to understand that the church is more than their own congregation. We want them to see church as the whole Body of Christ. They were dispersed churches, but now they have become a whole Body.”
The Institute is the brainchild of the Rev. Dr. Roberto Miranda, pastor of León de Judá, a large Hispanic congregation in Roxbury, and president of the Fellowship of Hispanic Pastors of New England, or Confraternidad de Pastorea Hispanos de Nueva Inglaterra (COPAHNI). Under his leadership, COPAHNI and the Emmanuel Gospel Center, an urban ministry center in Boston, launched the Institute in 2002, with an SPE grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
The Institute’s goal, says Miranda, is to help the area’s Hispanic pastors build a stronger foundation for ministry by providing them with basic pastoral education and training, promoting pastoral health, and reducing clergy isolation by building networks of friendship and support.
Under the Institute, 15 to 20 pastors are recruited each year to participate in a two—year program of conferences, workshops, and eight weekend retreats, each focused on a particular aspect of pastoral ministry such as planning, leadership, and administration.
The need for pastoral education and training is particularly critical in Hispanic ministry nationwide. According to a 2005 report on Hispanic churches conducted for the Pulpit & Pew project at Duke Divinity School, “better opportunities for formal theological education” is the most pressing issue facing Hispanic ministry in the United States .
The situation is no different in Boston and New England, says Miranda. Few of the region’s Hispanic pastors have much formal education or training, theological or otherwise. Usually recent immigrants, most of the pastors are from the various Pentecostal church traditions that are sweeping through Latin America and were called and affirmed to ministry by their home congregations.
“It’s an outlook on pastoral competency that is more oriented to charismatic and spiritual gifts and skills rather than the hard skills of pastoral competency such as administration, preaching and pastoral counseling,” says Miranda.
With its emphasis on vibrant and emotional, spirit—filled worship, such an approach to ministry can be remarkably successful in evangelizing and bringing in new believers, says Miranda. But without a firm foundation in basic pastoral ministry skills, such initial success inevitably plateaus quickly and then fades, he says.
Indeed, many immigrant Hispanic pastors arrive in the United States intending to replicate their home churches in Central or South America, but soon discover that what worked back home might not work so well in the United States.
“They find that the issues are different here than in their home country and that their members are facing new laws, a new culture and a new language,” says Rodriguez. “They think that spirituality can solve all their problems and solve everything in the church, but they soon find they don't have the tools to deal with the reality of life in this country.”
While emotional, spirit—filled worship can indeed attract new believers, it takes pastoral competency to turn those believers into disciples, says Miranda.
For the Institute, the challenge was to support and nurture Hispanic pastors’ spiritual zeal and passion but undergird it with fundamental skills in pastoral ministry. More precisely, says Miranda, the Institute seeks to help pastors understand their need for pastoral education and training and to stimulate an appetite for more.
“All we can really do in a weekend retreat is to complicate their minds, to help them understand that pastoral ministry is a whole lot more complicated than they thought” says Miranda. “If we do only that, then we will have achieved our goal.”
The Institute doesn't pretend to be a seminary. Instead, it is a very basic entry point into ministerial education for a group of pastors who have never had the opportunity for formal theological education, says Miranda.
“The Institute gives them a foretaste of what some sort of systematic education would provide,” says Miranda. “We want to prompt them to begin the process of self—examination and look at their own practice and their own need for more education. Once they go through this two—year process, we're hoping they will then go on to the next level.”
So far, it looks like the program is working. Already, 14 pastors—representing 40 percent of all participants in the first two classes—are taking courses at the Center for Urban Ministerial Education on the Boston campus of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. In turn, many pastors are also taking their new knowledge and passing it on to their parishioners, holding classes in their own churches on counseling and other issues and often inviting the same speakers from the Institute retreats.
The church’s role in the public arena is one of the most important and promising areas where the Institute is seeking to broaden pastors’ understanding and knowledge, says Miranda. The Institute, he says, wants to give pastors a broader vision of church. They want Boston ’s Hispanic pastors to understand that church is about more than giving people a spiritual “shot” on Sundays, and that pastors and their congregations are called to make a difference in the world.
“We help them to understand that the church is called to a public role,” says Miranda. “We want them to realize that it’s not just about spirituality strictly interpreted, but also about the entire gamut of life, social, economic, family and national issues. The church is supposed to be out there in the community, participating in the social service agency, the hospitals, the schools, and in government.”
Church, says Miranda, should be deeply involved in the life of a community, participating in its dramas and representing its people.
As the Institute’s pastors have gotten to know one another, as they have built bonds of friendship and support, they have become much more willing to step out and become involved in working for change in their communities. Many have also started social ministries in their own churches, such as providing courses for parishioners in computer training and English as a second language.
For the Institute, each success is helping to create further success. The program’s graduates encourage other pastors to sign up. Many are coming forward with suggestions for additional courses.
Since completing the program, Nora now works part—time as a recruiter for the Institute. He says the program is an easy sell.
“I just tell them about my experience and how the Institute helped me and my ministry,” he says. “I tell them that it gives you tools you can use in your life and your church to be a better pastor and a better leader.”
He’s already got 10 pastors on a waiting list for next year’s class.
For more on Hispanic ministry in the United States, read “Strengthening Hispanic Ministry Across Denominations: A Call to Action,” by Edwin I Hernandez et. al.
