Mascara and the Ministry


These days a frequent comment I get from students is, “You won’t be busy now that classes have finished” I tell them, “This is when the work starts.” There are special meetings to attend, articles to write, web sites to sort and a zillion things that were left undone to be done.

Among the special meetings were those with two academic officials from the Colombian Ministry of Education: a stern looking priest in a dazzling white shirt and one of those powerful Colombian females whose eyes are heavy with mascara. They’re the kind of people who turn up in my nightmares, but were actually very good at their job. The Seminary wants to launch a post-grad course on ethics with the complication of it being an online one. They came to suss out if we were up to it. The outcome is uncertain and we dream on.

Our poor undergraduates also had to face the Ministry of Education at 7am on Sunday, with a new external exam they must pass before they can graduate. This applies to all Colombian Universities and is a check on standards. Latin Americans take education seriously.

On Sunday night we went to the opening of a new church plant by a couple of Seminary students.

I’m just so thankful that with or without Ministry of Education approval, the Lord is building his church.

Photo: Speaker at recent graduation service

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A wonky couple of days

Only two weeks to go before semester finishes. Students are pretty stressed out. They cheered on Friday when class finished. Had a visit last night from an ex-evangelical pastor who's joined the Catholic church and now teaches religion in a an upmarket monks' school. He was keen to justify his actions so feel he's not at peace with the move. It made me think how poor the care of pastors is when things get difficult for them. And how astute Catholic clergy are, more so than their evangelical counterparts. Reading New Testament Theology by Philip Esler, who's trying to justify praying to the saints. Feel it's been a wonky couple of days.
Read more

Dangerous ground in Parliament Hall

It was like taking part in a Harry Potter episode.    The location was Parliament Hall where the Scots Parliament met in 1645-46.   You enter it by pushing open an unmarked door at 66 South Street,  St Andrews.     Bright panelled walls and enormous portraits look down upon you in a friendly manner. We were warned by the Divinity Dean,  Ivor Davidson,  that we were on dangerous ground.   What we were embarking on "involves confession,  petition,  doxology and wonder.   We are at the edges of what we can say".       This was a conference on the Doctrine of the Trinity. The first to speak,  Tom McCall,   had flown in (by aeroplane) from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School,  Chicago.    Since arriving he had spent a night in a tent on Ben Nevis,  and now he spoke at breakneck speed on the biblical data. The second speaker looked as if he had flown in on a broom stick.   Your archetypical kindly wizard,   white bearded  Professor Paul Fiddes of Oxford University
Read more

MacDonalds in the Seminary

Image
Each day I teach 13 students in the Seminary and 650 outside of it. There's my Biblical theology class and my theology internet site. Such is the demand for materials in Spanish that readership of Recursos Teologicos just keeps on growing. Even when I neglect the thing for months, it thrives.This has some unexpected advantages. Marketing people like the site: it's in, effectively, the world's second language and offers a sought after product. In the past year I've been kindly given a string of the latest theological titles for review. The kind of books no minister would ever be allowed to buy. "Darling, do you mind if I spend £60 on Paul Helm's book on Calvin?", has only one answer. And my laptop benefits from £700 of the best Bible Software just for the effort of writing my opinion of it. There are other unexpected developments: people write in with problems. Agony Aunt style, I put my responses on the site's Blog (like a
Read more