Petroleum engineer pursues doctoral degree to train, reach Hispanic community

“Seminary.”

It was the first word that popped into the mind of Cristina Aguilera, a Doctor of Education student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the morning after she was laid off from her engineering job in 2016.

Aguilera, a native of Barranquilla, Colombia, a populated tropical city on the northern coast of the South American country, had been working for four years in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex as a field engineer at a company in Everman, Texas, training fellow engineers. Educated as a petroleum engineer during her undergraduate studies at a university in Bucaramanga, Colombia, Aguilera spent her career traveling the world engaging in data acquisition from oil wells in areas including the United Arab Emirates and West Texas. In her role, she was the engineer that would record information in the well that enabled her clients to calculate the well’s reserves, including the levels of oil, water, and gas.

But it was not until she was in North Texas that the Lord used a series of circumstances to show Aguilera that He was calling her to ministry.

Aguilera recalled that as she was working as an engineer she told “the Lord that I wanted to have a time to learn about Him and His Word.” After taking a class at another higher educational institution in Dallas, she took a class called Perspectives on the Christian Movement in January 2016 that involved “a group of people from different churches.” She explained this spurred her on to “look for seminary and other classes.” Aguilera said through the perspectives class and a John Piper article “the Lord confronted me.”

“I think that was the first time that I realized that I was building my own kingdom,” Aguilera recalled. “I always told the Lord that ‘I will obey You’ or something, but I really was giving just my tithes and my Sundays.”

Aguilera remembered she “already had a career plan,” as well as “a mentor in Houston” and she “knew which job I wanted” and “that’s what I was going for,” but she was laid off a couple of weeks after the Lord confronted her.

“I guess He was preparing my heart already because my career was my identity,” Aguilera explained. “So, it was hard, but it didn’t really crush me, crush me, when He took that away.”

At the time she was attending Southcliff Baptist Church, near Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth. Aguilera said that many of her friends from church were from the seminary and she had visited campus for concerts and when she “understood that [seminary] was the next step” she did not “even look anywhere else.”

In the fall of 2016 Aguilera began working on a Master of Arts in Christian Education (MACE) degree in the Jack D. Terry School of Educational Ministries at Southwestern. When she graduated with her MACE in December 2019, Aguilera had been serving with Unbound, a local ministry that serves victims of human trafficking. However, she was ready to “go home” to her native Colombia, she recalled, with tickets purchased when the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 closed things worldwide. The result was a flight cancellation due to the airports in Colombia closing.

Aguilera said the only way she could stay in the United States “legally” was to apply to another degree program at Southwestern. She said she selected the Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling (MABC) because the core courses were the same as the MACE and she could complete the MABC in three semesters.

Following her second graduation from Southwestern Seminary in December 2021, Aguilera did “fully go home” to Colombia, she said, adding that she had been “sending my things in boxes for months.” However, Aguilera remembered, that prior to leaving “the Lord had already shown me the big gap that there is in solid teaching in the Hispanic community.” Aguilera added in her home country there is “a lot of prosperity gospel and ‘name it, claim it’ and all those things” and that “really people are not being told how to study the Bible.”

While the lack of solid teaching was “in my mind before I left,” Aguilera said, a conversation she had with Marco Murillo, pastor of The Heights Church en Español in Richardson, Texas, was also something she was considering.

Murillo, a native of Mexico who is a 2016 Master of Theological Studies graduate of Southwestern, spoke with Aguilera about the need for theological training at the doctoral level among Hispanics, reminding her that “the need is there,” she remembered.

“He said, ‘You can go home. The Lord can use you, wherever you go, to make disciples,’” Aguilera recalled, adding that Murillo encouraged her to “think about the multiplication.”

Aguilera said Murillo told her that “if you get trained in the doctoral degree, the platform that you have to train others is going to be bigger” while also noting to her that “we don’t have enough people trained like that in the Hispanic community.”

When she returned to her native Colombia, Aguilera applied and was accepted to Southwestern’s Doctor of Education program. Through her dissertation research in the program, Aguilera will be researching how to evaluate curricular design for online adult learning with a focus on Southwestern’s Hispanic Programs, where she works as the administrative assistant.

The Hispanic Programs is “growing,” Aguilera explained, noting that currently the Master of Theological Studies, the Master of Divinity, and Doctor of Ministry degrees, in addition to a certificate for women, make up the program’s offerings with anticipation of a Doctor of Philosophy degree on the horizon.

“As we grow, I think we need an instrument, a tool, a way to evaluate and make improvements because [the program] is growing so fast,” Aguilera said, adding that the tool will allow the program’s leadership to “correct” mistakes as the Hispanic Programs continues to expand.

Through her course of study at Southwestern, Aguilera said “the professors are very faithful to Scripture.”

Aguilera said she would encourage others to pursue their theological education at Southwestern because professors teach “solutions” to the “problems we see in discipleship, in evangelism, in counseling” that are “always based on what the Word says.”

“That’s invaluable, especially now because everybody has their own truth,” Aguilera concluded.

Aguilera anticipates graduating in May 2025.