Truman Road Campus and the Guadalupe Centers, Inc.

Exerpts from the President Report given by Saint Paul President H. Sharon Howell  Report at the Awards Dinner on November 10.

Saint Paul School of Theology is a seminary of the United Methodist Church. It is a seminary of collaborations. We are in our 7th year of a collaboration with Oklahoma City University and the Oklahoma Annual Conference. We are in our 2nd year of a collaboration with Church of the Resurrection of the Great Plains Annual Conference. Collaboration is really a theological term for “bold, cutting edge, visionary, faithful and faith-filled” creative relationships with United Methodist institutions.     

Saint Paul was birthed in the heartland out of a need for theologically educated and practically trained pastors. We are still that seminary. Saint Paul pitched its tent with National College at Truman Road and Van Brunt.

It wandered over to Cherry Street on the edge of the University of Missouri Kansas City, Missouri campus. It returned to Truman and Van Brunt to be the stewards of the campus where National College had educated and trained deaconesses and missionaries to serve the people of God all over the world.

Saint Paul expanded to Oklahoma City with the radical hospitality of Oklahoma City University and the Oklahoma Annual Conference.

Saint Paul packed up and moved again, this time to share space with Church of the Resurrection and design new collaborative experiences which provide opportunities for students, faculty and practitioners to share scholarship and the practice of ministry.        

Saint Paul took its stewardship responsibilities of the National College/Saint Paul campus at Truman & Van Brunt very seriously. Who would be given the assignment of embracing the long mission and education history of the Truman Road campus? How could a “mission match” be made?

The legacy institution is the Guadalupe Centers, Inc. (GCI) It is the longest continuously operating organization serving Latinos in the United States since 1919. They are now the stewards of holy ground and holy mission.

Cris Medina, CEO of the Guadalupe Centers, Inc., embraced the mantle of stewardship and thanked Saint Paul for entrusting the legacy to them.

All the names of the buildings have remained the same. The name of the campus is Villa Guadalupe and reflects that it is home to the neighborhood with specific focus on the growing Latino community centered in the crossroads of the Northeast and East side.

Jean Paul Chaurand, Chief Operation Officer, presented a power point of pictures and data which were a magnificent testimony to a campus filled with children; 775 meals prepared in the Holter Center kitchen which are then taken to all the Guadalupe mission locations; summer music enrichment classes with 150 students for the first year; plans for the charter school to move to the Kansas-Winger building.

Zartman is to become a community center;

Ada Mead a senior adult residence; the West Building (formerly the Missouri Conference Center) holds a dozen social workers and a new credit union opens

this month. And the Dawson Library will become-a library!

The Holter Center kitchen is also a Culinary School. The only piece of equipment changed was removing the deep fryer and replacing with a steamer -healthy meals for healthy children! The spirit of education for mission continues at the Truman Road campus. Thanks be to God.