This June marks the tenth anniversary of our online course program at Augsburg Lutheran Seminary. It has been ten years of a profound transformation of our seminary. Prior to our online course program, the Seminary served only a small handful of Mexican students who took classes on our campus at the Theological Community of Mexico and the Lutheran Center next to it. Now the seminary regularly has online students from all over Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, the U.S., and other places as well.
In early 2011, we formed a team of three professors and three seminary students to begin to work together on the courses. We decided to begin by offering two short sixweek courses in which anyone could enroll for free. The first was a course titled “Introduction to the Bible,” which was designed to give the students the background necessary to do contextual readings of Scripture. The second course was on Martin Luther and the Reformation, which had the objective of promoting an alternative vision of the faith and the church from a Lutheran perspective. While I designed the content of both courses, the other members of the team did the artwork, videos, and other aspects of the design. When we launched the courses, we had almost forty students for each of the first two courses. Since then we have continued to offer these courses every two months (six times a year) and have had well over 2,000 students enroll from all of the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America and other countries around the world. This means that we have offered each of these free courses about sixty times since they first began. Two of our professors, Roberto Trejo and Yulied Alonso, co-teach them with me.
After designing the two free courses, we prepared six courses for our diploma or certificate program in the Christian Faith. These courses last for twelve weeks each and we offer two of them every four months so that each diploma program lasts for one year. They cover introductions to the Old and New Testaments as well as church history and introductions to theology and biblical interpretation. The next year we opened a similar diploma program with six courses in the Lutheran Tradition. I did the content for five of these courses and other members of the team did the rest of them. Naturally, we charge for these courses and one of the prerequisites for doing a diploma program is to have finished at least one of the free courses. We have had students from all different backgrounds, including many nonLutherans, and our professors have also used material from these same courses to offer courses in person in other places in Mexico and Central America.
Currently we are working on eight new courses for our Diploma in Biblical Studies that we plan on opening in September. We will also continue revising our other courses to adapt to the new technologies and forms of virtual education that have been developed recently. In addition, we are now teaching other courses online for our other programs. These ten years have been a time of tremendous growth and learning for all of us. As a result of our online program, our Seminary has now established close ties with Lutheran churches throughout Latin America and is working with many of those churches, as well as many pastors and leaders in other churches, including the ELCA.
These past two months have been filled with many activities. In addition to co-teaching the two free courses and teaching two diploma courses in our online program (Introduction to Theology and Lutheran Confessions), I continued to teach New Testament Theology as well as a course on Pedagogy of Paulo Freire by Zoom for the Seminary and Theological Community. For my pedagogy course, I had the students design and carry out educational projects that allowed them to incorporate Freire’s ideas. The semester ended on June 11. The Theological Community also asked me to teach an intensive course on Theologies of the Reformation during the week of May 24-28 that lasted four hours each day. In the course we looked at the theologies of Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, and the Anabaptists, as well as other Protestant and Catholic theologies of the Reformation period. On May 20 I taught one of the modules for a course on Gender and Leadership in Church and Society offered by the United Theological College of the West Indies in Jamaica, which serves English-speaking students throughout the Caribbean area. This nine-week course was a new experience and to some degree an experiment, since each week it incorporated a different professor from various locations in the Caribbean and Latin America. About thirty students participated by Zoom. One of the main organizers was ELCA missionary Hellen Ríos-Carrillo (second from right below in photo taken of ELCA missionaries and mission staff in 2019), who hopes to continue to work with the college in Jamaica and also with our seminary in Mexico to do courses with a similar format, bringing together professors from around the region in a collaborative effort.
In May and June, our Seminary organized a sixweek intensive course on what is called in Spanish the “Lectura popular de la Biblia,” which is difficult to translate, but involves reading the Bible among people in everyday settings and contexts. It is a way of interpreting Scripture that invites lay people of all different backgrounds to reflect and comment on the biblical texts. All of our professors participated in the Zoom/Facebook Live course, which enrolled participants from Mexico and a number of other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. We also had other events, including a Zoom/Facebook Live panel on the topic of building inclusive communities with the participation of several of the woman pastors who are president or vice-president of Lutheran churches in Argentina and Chile. On a more personal note, since the beginning of the year I have been working on revising the theological website that I originally created in 2017 for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and the renewed site is finally ready! You can see it at: https://94t.mx. It has a collection of my writings, including not only articles but selections from my books. In May my new book came out titled “The Parting of the Gods: Paul and the Redefinition of Judaism.” The title is a play on words on the idea of the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity. The book is in English, of course, and there is plenty of information about it on my 94t.mx website. You can also view it on the Amazon website by clicking HERE. In June I took part in a Bible Study and a Sunday forum at two of our sponsoring congregations, and would remind you that I am always available for activities of that type!
MORE NEWS AND INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE AT
http://dbrondos.mx or https://94t.mx
Donor site: https://www.elca.org/missionarysponsorship
E-mail: david.brondos@elca.org
Invitations to preach or give presentations at your congregation online are always welcome!
