Key points
- Lloyd Ambrosius has died at age 82.
- He was a longtime history professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an active, mission-minded member of Saint Paul United Methodist Church.
- Ambrosius had a key role in launching Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean, an endowed fund that supports Methodist missions and ministry in those regions.
Lloyd Ambrosius taught American history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for nearly five decades, winning Fulbright fellowships and becoming a leading authority on Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy.
Along the way, Ambrosius also made history — of the United Methodist kind.
He played a crucial role in creating and growing Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean. That endowed fund, administered by the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries, has over the years distributed more than $1 million in small grants for Methodist mission work in Central and South America, Mexico and the Caribbean.
Pastor education in Nicaragua. A new Sunday school curriculum in the Virgin Islands. Livestock care training for rural women in Guatemala. Support for a medical boat ministry in the Amazon.
These and many other initiatives owe to Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean — which owes to Ambrosius’ leadership.
“Lloyd was pivotal,” said the Rev. Wilson Boots, a former United Methodist missionary in Bolivia and the first staff person for Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Ambrosius died May 7 at age 82, a few days after attending the United Methodist General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. There he’d volunteered in the exhibition hall booth for Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean. He also attended a breakfast that brought together supporters of the fund, including United Methodist bishops and leaders from autonomous Methodist denominations south of the U.S.
“He loved the breakfast and seeing old friends,” said son Walter Ambrosius.
Among those lately reflecting on Lloyd Ambrosius’ contributions as a committed United Methodist layman has been retired Bishop Joel Martinez.
Martinez and Ambrosius served on the Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean advisory board, which Ambrosius chaired from 1992 to 2018.
“He had worked hard to create (Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean), and he wanted to make sure that it moved forward,” Martinez said. “He challenged all of us to support it. He was preaching to the choir. Still, the choir had a lot of other things to do. But he kept us on the case.”
Ambrosius was born on Aug. 21, 1941, and grew up on a farm in west-central Illinois. He earned three degrees, including a doctorate in history from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 1967, he accepted a faculty job at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
There, Ambrosius would balance teaching with writing such books as “Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition,” “Wilsonian Statecraft” and “Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism.” He chaired his school’s history department for five years and was a founding member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Ambrosius traveled often to Europe, having two Fulbright faculty fellowships in Germany, as well as guest teaching assignments at the University of Heidelberg and at University College in Dublin. A decade before his 2015 retirement, he was named the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations.
Lloyd and his wife, Margery Marzahn Ambrosius, were also, from their early days in Lincoln, active, mission-minded members of the city’s Saint Paul United Methodist Church.
“They were involved locally as well as through the greater church globally,” said Marilyn Moore, their longtime friend and current lay leader of Saint Paul.
Margery Ambrosius, who taught political science at Kansas State University, chaired the Nebraska Conference’s work in Nigeria, which included establishing an orphanage and school. She made repeat trips to the country, meeting with United Methodist leaders there.
Meanwhile, Lloyd Ambrosius served from 1984 to 1992 as a member of the board of directors of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries.
“He thought he could make a difference,” Walter Ambrosius said. “He cared deeply about human rights, human dignity, hunger issues.”
As a Global Ministries director, Ambrosius chaired the Latin American/Caribbean Committee.
“Lloyd and others began to see that (United Methodist) resources were going to other regions and were not coming to the Latin America and Caribbean regions,” Boots said.
Subscribe to our
e-newsletter
Ambrosius invited fellow committee members to a meeting at his home in Lincoln, to brainstorm but also to persuade them that they could be an effective force within Global Ministries.
“Lloyd gave commitment and careful leadership in empowering that committee,” Boots said.
Ambrosius next helped organize and lead a major meeting — formally called a consultation — in Antigua, Guatemala, in 1991. That brought together United Methodist leaders, including several bishops, with representatives from the Council of Evangelical Methodist Churches in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas. British Methodist leaders came, too.
Nora Boots — wife and fellow Bolivian missionary of Wilson Boots, and in 1991 a Global Ministries associate general secretary — worked closely with Ambrosius to make the Antigua meeting happen. She recalls him as a “very disciplined and highly committed” leader there.
The meeting strengthened ties between United Methodists and the autonomous Methodist groups and provided the vision for a first-ever endowed fund to support Methodist mission and ministry in Central and South America, Mexico and the Caribbean.
The name “Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean” came from Ambrosius, Nora Boots and Bill Wyman, then treasurer of Global Ministries’ world division, and reflected the spirit of the meeting, according to Wilson Boots.
“There was a keen sense of the presence of Christ in their midst,” he said.
With encouragement by Ambrosius and others, the directors of Global Ministries approved Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean as a permanent fund in 1992.
“He, along with Nora Boots, had the most to do with its implementation, with the fact that it was actually created and approved,” said the Rev. Doug Ruffle, current staff person for Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Ambrosius rotated off the Global Ministries board in 1992 but that year became the first chair of the fund’s advisory board.
“Lloyd brought a steady hand and a persistence about moving forward,” Martinez said.
The advisory board’s work included raising money and, by 2005, the fund was at $2 million — enough to begin administering grants. The fund has since grown to $2.7 million and is providing about $120,000 annually for small grants across its target regions.
Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean is an organization as well as a fund, committed to raising money but also telling the story of Methodist partnerships and ministry in those regions, Ruffle noted.
Ambrosius remained on the advisory board until his death but after 26 years was succeeded as chair by the Rev. Cynthia Weems.
“His passion for its need and relevance in the Latin America and Caribbean region kept him focused not only on the fund’s creation but on its growth,” Weems said by email. “Years later, Lloyd shepherded the transition to my leadership as chair of the advisory board and he gifted me a portion of his wisdom.”
Margery Ambrosius died in 2018, and Lloyd moved last June to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to be close to son Walter. But he maintained ties to Lincoln and especially to Saint Paul United Methodist.
Indeed, the night of his death, Ambrosius joined online in a church book club meeting. They discussed “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” with Ambrosius seeming in good health and fully engaged, said Marilyn Moore, who was part of the discussion.
“Probably his last contact in life was with that group talking about ideas he thought were very important,” she said.
Ambrosius was found the next morning in his recliner, apparently having succumbed to cardiovascular failure.
“It’s hard on us, but I think it was quick and I don’t think he suffered,” said Walter Ambrosius, who chairs the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at Wake Forest School of Medicine. “It’s the way we’d all like to go.”
Lloyd Ambrosius is survived by brother John Ambrosius and sister-in-law Margaret Adams; son Walter and daughter-in-law Leslie Underwood; son Paul Ambrosius and daughter-in-law Valerie Daugherty; and grandchildren Michael Ambrosius and Em Ambrosius.
Donations to Encounter with Christ in Latin America and the Caribbean can be made through Global Minstries.
For those looking for another way to honor Ambrosius, his family notes that two of his former students established the Lloyd Ambrosius Graduate Student Support Fund at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Hodges is a Dallas-based writer for United Methodist News. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Weekly Digests.
