Jorgelina Lozada was one of the most outstanding graduates of the Women’s Training School, Instituto Modelo de Obreras Christianas, established in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1922 through cooperation between the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions and the Methodist Church.
Born on February 18, 1906, the daughter of a Protestant English mother and an Argentinean father, Jorgelina was baptized into the Belgrano Christian Church at age fifteen, entered the training school at age seventeen, and graduated at age nineteen. Her calling to ecumenical work was first nurtured in the Christian Church.
The career which I thus chose has opened many avenues of service and has challenged me to greater endeavor, resulting in an increased interest in the movement for unity and brotherhood which characterizes the communion with which I had my first contact and my first spiritual awakening.
Much of the credit for Jorgelina’s spiritual awakening goes to her Sunday school teacher, Señora Elena Colmegra de Azzati, who was the wife of the pastor of the Belgrano Church and an active Disciples churchwoman in Argentina. In 1930 Pastor Jorgelina was ordained at the Belgrano Christian Church as a home missionary, one of the first women to be ordained in Argentina. She served as pastor of the Villa Mitre Christian Church in Buenos Aires for twenty-four years. There she established a kindergarten and children’s medical clinic, and guided the parish in building a new church. As a preacher her goal was to make daily life a pulpit, that is, a means for spreading the good news.
And spread the good news she did, through extensive ecumenical work in South America-including establishing two libraries, serving as president of the Argentine League of Evangelical Women and on the editorial board of its journal Guia del Hogan, preparing Christian education materials in Spanish for use in Latin America, serving on boards of two colleges, working with United Church Women in the United States, and traveling around the world on preaching and administrative assignments. Pastor Jorgelina’s facility in Spanish and English, combined with her charisma and ability to speak and write, led to numerous invitations to participate in worldwide ecumenical gatherings.
“It was in such gatherings, as well as in church groups, that this young woman shone. Alert, sensitive to the social evils of her day, primed with Evangelical ideals, a facile speaker, she was always retdy to stand her ground without compromise, and yet with the courtesy and tact so strong in Latin America.”
Debra B. Hull, Christian Church Women: Shapers of a Movement (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1994), 58-60.