Rhetoric Race and Religion
Serving as director of the Center for the Study of Hispanic Church and Community and associate professor of Hispanic studies and pastoral leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary, Dr. Juan Martinez knows first-hand how vital it is for seminaries to come alongside Latino Christians who are oftentimes already active in ministry without having ever stepped inside a seminary.
“Most Latino Protestants are Pentecostals, which means that most of the students in the Hispanic Center are already in ministry and do not need a degree from Fuller to pastor. They study at Fuller as part of their continuing education, not to be ordained. Many of these students are on the fringe of U.S. Protestantism and do not regularly have to interact with the power structures of majority-culture churches,” Martinez writes in Aliens in the Promised Land.
Fuller Theological Seminary, which describes itself as “an evangelical, multidenominational, international and multiethnic community,” is located in Pasadena, Calif., and has an average enrollment of 4,300 students. The evangelical school, one of the largest in the world, asked Martinez in 2001 to take on leadership of its Hispanic Center. Fuller has been in the business of equipping Hispanic men and women for ministry for 35 years. In fact, Martinez, a Mennonite Brethren pastor who calls himself a “Latino leader,” earned his Ph.D. and Th.M. degrees at Fuller.
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