The Rev. Dr. William Yoo asks the two to look back and look ahead
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
Photo by Fabian Fauth via Unsplash
LOUISVILLE — A Tuesday webinar offered by Columbia Theological Seminary looked back at lessons learned throughout history to point to possible solutions during today’s uncertain and polarized times.
The Rev. Dr. William Yoo, the Associate Professor of American Religious and Cultural History at Columbia Seminary, hosted the hour-long webinar. His guests were Dr. Catherine Gunsalus González, Professor Emerita in Church History at Columbia Seminary, and her husband, Dr. Justo Luis González, a Cuban American historical theologian, prolific author and Methodist elder. Yoo called his guests “pioneers who in their older age have become legends in Christian education and history.”
Yoo asked them: What are the biggest changes in Christianity, here and globally?
Drs. Justo and Catherine González were the guests this week on a webinar hosted by the Rev. Dr. William Yoo of Columbia Theological Seminary.
“It’s the enormous effect of migration,” Catherine González said. “We see it in our communities, but that’s the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in the world.” With Christianity’s gains in Africa and Asia, “the growth is there, and it’s coming to our country and to Western Europe and other parts of North America. We have not yet begun to imagine the effects of migration.”
Justo González said there are now more Puerto Rican church workers working in New York “than New York sends missionaries to the whole world.”
“There are painful decisions being made to emigrate,” he said. “You didn’t choose the United States, but I did. People in immigrant churches are committed to the country where they are.”
Asked by Yoo what they see as the greatest challenges and opportunities for Christian ministry, Catherine González said the struggle for mainline churches is “how to cope with a radically new situation.”
“It’s more odd now to go to church than to not go,” she said. “It’s hard to figure out what ministry is in that kind of setting. It’s not [the pastor’s] fault people aren’t coming to church, but what is your responsibility in the midst of that? It’s partly to comfort the congregation and discover what the mission of the church is.”
“Part of what’s happening is the type of people mainline churches appealed to is decreasing,” Justo González said. “Mainline churches don’t realize how closely tied to their own culture they were. We didn’t do enough to understand other cultures, and as diversity grows, the mainline church is more marginalized.”
“The greatest challenge we have,” he said, “is we have to learn how to teach Christianity when the society no longer does. … Theological education is something the church is supposed to be doing.”
Immigrant congregations “are overflowing with young people,” Catherine González said. Such congregations and worshiping communities “know how to operate here because they were not part of the mainstream in their culture. There is a great deal we can learn from people right here who are developing churches that are astonishing.”
Dr. William Yoo
Yoo concluded his questions by asking: “Looking back and ahead, what brings you joy?”
“To see the church has been here before,” Catherine González said. “Our history is full of times where the church had no idea what to do. This isn’t the first time we have been faced with not having an idea what to do, but the Holy Spirit will give us an idea of what to do.”
“It’s to see somehow God moves us where God wants us to move in ways we are not used to,” Justo González said. “Is there a way to trust God and find consensus on those burning issues of our time?”
During a question-and-answer session, Catherine González noted that success for churches “isn’t married to numbers.” She mentioned a Salvadoran worshiping community started by a man who began holding prayer meetings in his living room. “It developed into a congregation that met in a garage, and now that man is the pastor,” having earned an online degree, she said. “The congregation is moving at the same speed. The congregation asks, what does it mean to be church in this society? Can we speak up in a society where not every member has his papers? His congregation has grown enormously.”
“I don’t think there is Christianity that’s not part of culture,” she said. “Christianity was born in culture, and it’s shifted culture many times. You always have to shed parts of the previous culture. It needs to be a response to your own culture, and the next generation will reject things you are accepting now.”
Many immigrant churches include time for testimonials during worship, Justo González said, following the pattern of, “This is what God did for me this week or this is what I did for God this week,” he said.
Dr. Ondina González, the couple’s niece, spoke briefly about the Justo and Catherine González Resource Center. “Our focus is to make available their unpublished works, sermons, Bible studies, conferences — a wealth of material,” she said. “We are uploading those so you can get them digitally. It’s a slow process, but it’s happening. We hope you will take advantage of what we have to offer.”
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