New students expand seminary’s reach Bangor draws from Europe, Africa, Australia

If she had known then what she knows now, Hilke de Vries would have brought more chocolate when she left Germany this summer to attend Bangor Theological Seminary.

“At night, when you are studying and you don’t want to do something, you take some chocolate. Then, you feel you can do it and you get to work,” she told her fellow students Wednesday at a reception for the four international students studying at the seminary this year.

She also said she would have applied for her student visa earlier. She and Johannes M?ller, both 21, are part of an exchange program formed this summer with Kirchliche Hochschule, a seminary in Wuppertal, Germany.

They are the first students from that institution to attend the Bangor seminary, and will return home in May.

Paul Baker, a graduate, recently left to study at the new sister seminary in Germany.

While few international students have been enrolled at Bangor in recent years, 50 years ago the institution trained many ministers who returned to their home countries after graduation, according to seminary President William Imes.

Sue King, 44, a nurse who was born in Australia and lived many years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is another of the new students. So is the Rev. Ezra Chapola, 33, of Harare, Zimbabwe. Both are working toward their master of divinity degrees.

All four students, including King, agreed that adapting to everyday language and culture are their greatest challenges, with American food a close second.

Chapola, who was born in Malawi, already speaks three languages, including English, and M?ller and de Vries speak several European languages. But American slang and Maine expressions sometimes stump them.

The four agreed, however, that while the content of the education they’re receiving at Bangor is similar to what they could get at home, the approach to teaching and learning is very different.

All of them come from larger, more metropolitan cities than Bangor. In Germany, de Vries and M?ller lived in a crowded dorm with many other students their own age. Here, they live on the seminary campus with a handful of others, some of them old enough to be their parents. But they have found the age difference intriguing.

“All the [older] students have a story about why they are here and what they did before,” said de Vries.

“One of them is a dog trainer,” added M?ller. “I’ve never met a dog trainer before.”

They have more freedom here to come and go as they please, but the lack of public transportation in Bangor makes getting around without a car difficult. They also are in a community considerably smaller than Wuppertal, a city of 500,000 with more of everything, including people their own age with an interest in religion.

The reasons each chose to attend seminary, however, are no different from their classmates’.

“The Lord has been nudging me to stop running and being a nurse,” King said Wednesday afternoon. “I want to be a chaplain ‘when I grow up.'”

M?ller decided to enter the seminary to serve God, but he also is going into the family business. His father, uncle and grandfathers are ministers. Recently, he discovered that beginning in 1782 one of his ancestors served a church in the village where Muller grew up.

De Vries wants to be a minister, but she is not sure if she will be led to preach or do something else. She will have plenty of time to decide. In Germany, ministers must study for 10 years before they are ordained and able to be pastor of a church on their own. In the United States, Protestant ministers sometimes spend four years in college, followed by three years in a seminary.

An ordained minister for more than two years, Chapola said he was recommended to the seminary by other United Church of Christ ministers in Zimbabwe who studied at the Bangor seminary in the 1980s. The 189-year-old seminary is affiliated with the United Church of Christ denomination.

Chapola said Wednesday that he came to Bangor to pursue his studies so he could be “academically equipped and spiritually equipped” to minister to his flock. “The two go hand in hand,” said Chapola, who expects to be preaching in Maine churches as part of his studies.

Chapola’s wife, Taona, and 4-year-old son, Ezra Jr., live with him on the seminary campus.

Protestant worship services, he observed, are very different in Maine than in his home community.

“We have a lot of beating of drums, a lot of dancing in church and clapping,” he said. “They can last two hours or more, depending on what we are doing.

“The desire to serve the Lord, that’s what pushed me to become a pastor,” he said.