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One of Sheena Rolle’s, MDiv’18, most profound experiences at Princeton Theological Seminary took place when she went on the Seminary’s travel course “Towards Understanding Other Cultures.”
It was in Ghana, where she went swimming in a river, knowing that her ancestors may have bathed in those same African waters before they were sold into slavery. “It’s that feeling of moving with freedom instead of bondage in these very same places,” said Rolle, MDiv’18.
She brought what she learned to her work as senior director of strategy for Florida Rising, a social justice nonprofit that organizes residents to rally for reproductive freedom, voting rights, and economic justice.
Tara Woodward, MDiv, MCEF ’21, who went on the travel course to Brazil, found her calling in South Africa, where the Nebraska native is working to build hope and economic relief in a society struggling with 30 percent unemployment.
“The travel course experience fosters a certain humility, and a willingness to engage with other cultures,” said Woodward, a missional networker for Resonate Global Mission, an affiliate of the Christian Reformed Church.
Since 2017, the travel course Towards Understanding Other Cultures has been bringing small groups of seminarians to the Global South for brief but intense explorations into culture, theology, race, and history that students say are life changing, and frequently career-shaping. Offered every two years, typically during two weeks in January, the course has brought groups of 15 to 25 students to Ghana, Brazil, South Africa, and Kenya.
The experience reflects the vision of Professor Afe Adogame, the Seminary’s Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Religion and Society. He developed the course to prepare students for ministry in an era of mass migration, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and ever-increasing globalization.
“As the world becomes a global village, there continues to be mutual ignorance across cultures,” said Adogame.
I felt there had to be better ways to build bridges, and that this could be done through an academic perspective, but also with the awareness that the best way to learn about culture is by encountering it.
This year, the travel course went to Kenya, where students attended seminars at the University of Nairobi and experienced worship at local churches. They visited schools, and saw firsthand the effects of globalization and the legacy of colonialism at a farm producing what would later be marketed worldwide as “English tea.”
“They praised God on another level, with their whole bodies, with dancing,” said Rochelle Haggins, a third-year MDiv student and an aspiring minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “Witnessing that made me want to open myself up and to connect with God on a deeper level.”
For Damion Parran, also a third-year MDiv student, the experience fostered a spirit of deep introspection in which he felt affirmed in his goal of becoming a chaplain.
“Seeing people engage with me who had never encountered me before brought home to me just how important it is for people, for humanity, to be in union with one another,” Parran said. “Just to see that, and just to be present, it brought me to closer to God, closer to understanding God’s intentionality in creating humanity.”
Adogame got inspiration for the course from his own life experiences around the globe. A scholar of world Christianity, he grew up in Nigeria and spent decades studying and teaching in Germany and Scotland before joining the faculty at Princeton Seminary.
For the Kenya trip, Telesia Musili, a lecturer in religious studies at Nairobi University, helped Adogame organize an interdisciplinary group of scholars, and arranged visits to churches and other sites.
“Instead of a one-hour service, this was three hours,” Musili said. “We brought them right into the practical and everyday aspects of encountering other cultures.”
While the course is centered in the Global South, Adogame said one of its implicit goals is to prepare students for ministry in a Global North struggling to come to terms with diversity.
“Americans no longer need to travel overseas to encounter the world,” he said. “The world is now right here. Just look at our neighbors, our churches, and our work colleagues.”
As theologians, as ministers, we must ask: “How do we relate to people? How do we connect with others?
For alumni, that question remains central to their work in ministry.
After the Ghana trip, Jonathon Reece, MDiv’20, MCEF’20, found an internship serving as a cross-cultural communicator. After graduation, he became director of community engagement for a church in Colorado Springs and is developing plans for a nonprofit that trains foreign missionaries to work in the United States.
For Tara Woodward, who went on the Brazil course, the experience nourished her interest in liberation theology. She recalls how clergy in impoverished areas showed unshakable commitment to the poor. Now settled in the Gauteng Province, near Johannesburg, she builds partnerships with civic educational, and religious institutions to address urban poverty. One of her current projects is to develop a job training program for youth and young adults.
“A huge part of the course was: ‘how do you walk well alongside vulnerable communities?” Woodward said. “And that is what I am trying to learn here. I didn’t come to South Africa to serve in a church in a fancy suburb.”
Beyond what they encountered on the travel course, alumni say that most enduring lessons they learned was through observing Adogame.
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Sheena Rolle, who was a seasoned community organizer before enrolling in Seminary, saw on the Ghana trip how Adogame had built a community of colleagues and scholars that helped bring it to life.
“These were people he was in deep international theological relationship with,” she said. “To me, that looks a lot like movement work.”
Rolle noted how Adogame guided students through the two-week journey, often pausing to debrief and give everyone a chance to share their thoughts and feelings.
“Dr. Adogame was creating community and modeling what it was like to do that,” Rolle said. “And that is one of the healing elements that I take back to my work.”
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