Read letters from Sherron George
Advent 2010
May 2010
April 2010
November 29, 2009
July 8, 2009
February 2009
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Sherron George
In 1995, after serving in Brazil with the PC(USA) for 23 years, Sherron George returned to the United States. She thought she was returning for good. Her first step back was as a missionary-in-residence in the Worldwide Ministries Division, working on the Year with Latin Americans churchwide initiative. She then accepted a position as associate professor of evangelism and mission at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. From 1996-2001, she taught at APTS and traveled widely as a keynote speaker in mission conferences. But then, once again, Sherron began to hear the call to return to share her gifts in South America as a mission co-worker with the PC(USA).
She is World Mission’s regional liaison and theological education consultant for South America. As regional liaison she helps build relationships between the PC(USA) and partner churches in South America, she helps implement regional strategies and support mission personnel, and she represents the area office for Latin America and the Caribbean on request of the coordinator. As theological education consultant she occasionally teaches postgraduate courses on mission and maintains contacts with seminaries throughout the continent. Sherron encourages networks of theological schools and ecumenical organizations in Latin America.
Reflecting on her decision to leave Austin Seminary and return to Brazil, Sherron stated in an address to the American Society of Missiology in Chicago: “After six years of relearning and re-engaging the missionary situation in the culture and church of the U.S.A. from the local-global perspective of an ‘insider-outsider’ and articulating my missiology in the seminary ... God’s missional movement has pushed me to a new frontier. I have journeyed from missionary to missiologist and now am returning to Brazil ... as a ‘feet-on-the-ground’ missionary-missiologist consultant.”
During the period from 1972 to 1980, Sherron served as an itinerant Christian education consultant in 14 rural congregations in southwestern Brazil. She then studied for two years at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. In the 1980s she taught briefly at a Lay Training Center in Manaus, a city of 1 million people on the Amazon River, and at the Bible Institute of the Caiua Indian Mission in Dourados, in Mato Grosso do Sul. After completing her studies at Columbia Seminary and being ordained as a minister, Sherron taught at the Theological Seminary of the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil (IPI) in Londrina from 1987 1990. She was on the faculty of the Theological Seminary of the South of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil (IPB) in Campinas from 1991 to 1995.
Sherron is from Mebane, North Carolina. She completed undergraduate studies at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned her master’s degree at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1986, Sherron was awarded the Doctor of Ministry degree from Columbia Theological Seminary and was ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament at her home church, Mebane Presbyterian Church. She is a member of Mission Presbytery. She is the author of four texts in Portuguese and two in Spanish. Her publications in English include Meeting Your Neighbor: Multiculturalism in Luke and Acts and “From Missionary to Missiologist at the Margins” in Teaching Mission in a Global Context. Her most recent book, published by Geneva Press in June, 2004, is Called as Partners in Christ’s Service: the Practice of God’s Mission. It was released in Portuguese and Spanish at the Ninth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 2006.
Birthday: September 3
