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The work of the South American Mission Society (SAMS) began in the early nineteenth century with the pioneering vision of Allen Gardiner who went to Patagonia (southern Argentina and Chile) to work with indigenous people groups. This work bore fruit, but the mission of the Anglican church in the Southern Cone stayed with the indigenous people, and British expats, until the 1960s.
However, if the church was to be a church for the whole of Chile, it could not remain in a small part of society. With this in mind there was a concerted effort at church planting in the cities of Chile in the 1960s aiming at all levels of society, especially the formerly neglected middle and upper classes and the communities outside the South.
The Chilean church has grown in size and social diversity as a result and one of the main problems now facing the church is the training of leaders. Up until very recently there has been no theological education above a relatively basic level unless people speak good enough English to study abroad. When many of the leaders were foreign missionaries this was less of a problem, but, as the church leadership becomes predominantly national, the creation of a Chilean theological college has become a priority. In March 2003 the church started the Centro de Estudios Pastorales (or Centre for Pastoral Studies, 'CEP') under the leadership of the Chilean national César Guzmán, which is based in the capital Santiago. The aim of this center is to provide Spanish-language theological education for the church in Chile and wider a-field in the Southern Cone (we have a Paraguayan who will start studying with us in 2007 and there is the possibility of a Bolivian student too).
I will be teaching theology at the CEP in Santiago de Chile, using the theological education that I have received over the last eight years in Durham University (BA), Cambridge (MPhil and PhD), and Orlando (where I was the Nicole Scholar at Reformed Theological Seminary in 2005). I studied Spanish in Seville, Spain in late 2004, and lived in the USA during 2005.
The ministry of theological education/leadership training is a highly strategic ministry and one of the most important that we can bring to the majority world, as it is about multiplication. If I pastor a church I help one church. If I train 20 pastors I help 20 churches. Chile is strategically placed to reach out into other Latin American countries to enable this ministry of multiplication to spread out beyond its borders. A church is shaped, for good or for ill, by the training its pastors receive and our prayer is that through the CEP we can shape a generation of pastors who will teach scripture and present the good news of God's grace to Latin America.
This page is maintained and updated by James Palmer | 
