Mission co-workers Ross and Gloria Kinsler are remembered for their hospitality and for their support of undocumented refugees

LOUISVILLE — Longtime Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-workers Ross and Gloria Kinsler were remembered earlier this month with a service at Monte Vista Grove Homes in Pasadena, California, where they spent their final years. The hour-long service can be seen here.

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The Rev. Dr. Ross Kinsler, who helped develop the concept of Theological Education by Extension and taught it in seminaries around the world, died on Dec. 8, 2020, at age 85. Gloria Kinsler, who was known for facilitating visits of church delegations to Central American countries, died on Feb. 14, 2025, at age 89. The Kinslers had three children, Elizabeth, John and Paul. John died in 1997. Ten grandchildren complete the family.

The Rev. Matt Colwell, pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church in Pasadena, is living at Monte Vista Grove Homes after his family lost their home in the Eaton fire. “My introduction to Monte Vista Grove Homes was Bible study and an oatmeal breakfast at the Kinsler apartment, a wonderful introduction to an extraordinary community,” Colwell said. He prayed that God would grant those who have been blessed by the Kinslers “comfort and a yearning for your liberating reign to be known in our time.”

Grace Gyori, a friend of Gloria Kinsler, sent a taped tribute of her longtime friend. “I’ve been honored to have been in almost every house they lived in,” Gyori said. One day during a camping trip, the children of the two families left camp for a hike in the forest. “We parents began to worry after several hours passed without seeing our children,” Gyori said. Fortunately, the children trudged into the campsite late in the day. Ross Kinsler “composed a song commemorating this trek, which he repeatedly sang,” she said.

Once the Kinslers “retired” and moved to Southern California, Gloria became deeply involved in the sanctuary movement, Gyori said. “Churches were being challenged to offer asylum to undocumented refugees from Central America, and Gloria was particularly qualified to advocate for this initiative,” Gyori said. She called sharing her life with Gloria Kinsler “a deeply rewarding experience for me for so many years. I already miss her keenly.”

Ched Myers and Elaine Enns, of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, offered meditations on their late friends. “It is our prayer that they are dancing together on the other side surrounded by beloveds, just as we have gathered here today to honor them,” Enns said. “When we gather to remember those who have joined the cloud of witnesses, we acknowledge a genealogy of our faith, passed on hand to hand, heart to heart, song to song. Gloria and Ross were important elders and friends for us in the vocation of faith and justice.”

“This is super emotional for us,” Myers said. “We are so grateful to be together in person to do our loving duty to these ancestors.”

Using Isaiah 61:1-2a as a text, Myers noted the verses “rehabilitate and recontextualize the Levitical texts about Jubilee and release … in order to restore equity to a fractured community as befits a people brought out of enslavement by their God.”

Myers, a noted New Testament scholar, said that Jesus “famously cites” these verses “at his coming out performance at a Nazareth synagogue” in Luke’s gospel, “announcing this old Jubilee vision was being resuscitated again in his ministry.” After a “pregnant pause,” Jesus delivers “history’s shortest homily,” according to Myers. “‘Today,’ he says, ‘this scripture comes to life again.’”

“In their context of oppression in Central America, Gloria and Ross carried on this genealogy of Jubilee, through action, proclamation, and, as you can see from the back table, lots of publications,” Myers said. “We’re deeply grateful for their work and witness, which is why in 2014 we named our Bartimaeus Institute after them, the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute. That’s a genealogy of faith.”

“Gloria taught me how to make jam Central American style without a canner,” Enns said. “It’s a recipe I still use and share widely.”

“The Kinslers pursued heir vocation of gospel solidarity with tenacity, which we acknowledge was often hard on their own family,” Myers said. “But they did so with humility, such that when they passed, respectively, there were achingly few obituaries or public tributes. This gathering, gratefully, corrects that.”

“So, friends, let us carry on that genealogy, especially in this new dark age of plutocracy and autocracy,” Myers said. “Let us continue to labor for the day when the Creator will transfigure our wounded history into a Jubilee for all peoples, and all of Creation.”

Family members and friends then remembered the Kinslers. Daughter Beth had triplets, and her mother “came every single summer to help me with those babies. I could never have done it without her.”

Grandson Jack said it’s “hard for me to comprehend the extent of their reach and their significance. People call me an optimist and an idealist. I think that’s a witness to the purity with which they lived their lives, giving me certainty that there is good in the world, and that good will ultimately prevail.”

The Rev. Dr. Jill Shook started a Central American study group while serving as campus minister at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. “It was so hard to get information about what was going on,” Shook said. Later Shook moved to Pasadena and began attending Bible study in the Kinsler home. “I felt like I had come home,” Shook said. “It changed me to know there was someone so committed to justice and Jubilee.”

Karlene Cunningham, who along with her husband Bill were neighbors of the Kinslers, said, “You could knock on their door in the morning while they were eating their cereal. They’d invite you in and you’d just sit at the table and talk.”

She and Gloria “shared a love of textiles,” Cunningham said. When Cunningham was asked to deliver a talk on Guatemalan textiles, “I raided Gloria’s trunk to get more. I loved her like a sister.”

The Rev. Wendy Gist, who serves both the Presbytery of San Gabriel and .the Presbytery of San Fernando, said that in 1994, she and her husband moved to Nicaragua to begin their mission work. “What was the first thing the PC(USA) had us do?” Gist asked. “Join a delegation with Gloria Kinsler. That was our beginning in Central America, and what a wonderful way to start.”

Over the years, Gist served as a delegation coordinator in Nicaragua. “Gloria would come through every now and then with her groups. It was always a joy, always an education to be with her,” Gist said. “I am thankful for people like Gloria who helped educate us about Central America and continued to be friends after we returned. I’m blessed to have known both her and Ross.”

The Rev. Don Smith shared memories of the Central America task force established by the Synod of Southern California and Hawaii. “A group of us were awakened to the realities of liberation theology and what it means for the people of Latin America — and more importantly, what it meant for us as our lives were transformed,” Smith said.

The last time Smith visited an ailing Gloria Kinsler, he showed her a picture of herself, Smith and the Rev. John Fife seated in the lobby of the Los Angeles Times waiting to speak to reporters and editors about providing sanctuary for Central American refugees. “I knew her memory was failing, but I thought if something could jog that memory, maybe this picture will,” Smith said. “I said, ‘Do you remember this?’ and she said, ‘I do!’ with this firmness. I treasure that memory, and Ross as well, such an important figure in my life.”

Former mission co-worker Rachel Lausch read the final stanza of the poem “They Have Threatened Us with Resurrection” by Julia Esquivel, a Guatemalan Presbyterian who was forced to live in exile during the worst years of the Guatemalan civil war. Here’s the final verse, which Lausch read in both English and Spanish:

“Join us in this vigil
and you will know what it is to dream!
Then you will know how marvelous it is
to live threatened with Resurrection!

To dream awake,
to keep watch asleep,
to live while dying,
and to know ourselves already
resurrected!”