Students Engage with Mother Church and Mother Earth

International students from Boston University School of Theology had to make a lot of adjustments when COVID-19 changed life as they knew it. Even though change was stressful, it became a way to reset priorities and do life together.

They learned to “Engage Mother Church to Mother Earth.”

Rev. Dr. Cristian De La Rosa is clinical assistant professor of contextual theology and practice and director of contextual education and community partnerships at Boston University School of Theology. She works with students to establish fellowship and relationships with churches.

Working with Belmont-Watertown UMC (in suburban Boston) to apply for a grant from Discipleship Ministries, Dr. De La Rosa wanted to help ethnic and international seminarians bridge church, academy, and community through their studies, engagement in justice ministries, and internships at local congregations in the New England Conference.

Discipleship Ministries awarded a grant to create gatherings of students with faculty and pastors. The gatherings would provide opportunities for students to engage with a congregations or other church-supported organizations so that they could see where real life intersects with what they are learning in school.

Plans were made and progress began. Then COVID-19 hit. School closed. Churches closed. But unlike American students, many international students were stuck. Some couldn’t leave the country due to travel restrictions. Many lost their student work on campus, but weren’t allowed to get off-campus jobs because of student visa restrictions. They had no income.

Dr. De La Rosa had to adjust the plan very quickly.

“We had to find alternatives for implementing the proposed activities online or within the spaces of the intentional communities where the students live,” she said. “We identified very good alternatives and program components to fulfill most of the proposed goals. The alternatives also would need to strengthen the relationships between the local congregations and the students through practicums that would serve as summer internships for most of the students involved in the project.”

In addition, the students had a very practical request. They needed food. Money was tight for most of them. They asked Dr. De La Rosa to allow them to use some of the funds to buy food, then let them host Zoom dinners with church pastors to talk about the same topics that they would have had they been able to physically get together.

This led Dr. De La Rosa to create a new outline. She called it Engagement with Mother Church and Mother Earth. Using this plan, she appointed a student as garden coordinator and organized the students in each of the intentional communities to establish a vegetable garden as a collective activity. The hope was that each garden would produce food for the group with enough left to share with other students in need. This links the church with the program and the earth with the vegetables: Engaging Mother Church to Mother Earth.

Watertown-Belmont UMC received a Racial Ethnic Local Church Concerns grant for this project. The grant is intended to provide funding to strengthen the ethnic local church through leadership training, small groups, worship, stewardship, and spiritual formation as they engage in developing disciple-making systems inside the church and in the community. Priority is given to new programs/ministries that move churches to places where disciples are formed, grow, and make new disciples of Jesus Christ who will transform the world. Programs must involve racial ethnic church members in planning, leadership, and decision-making.

Discipleship Ministries provides the funding. Grants are available for up to $7,000.

Go to the Grants and Scholarship page on the Discipleship Ministries website to learn more.