From the Dean & President - S&H Mar/Apr 2005

The February meeting of Trinity’s Board of Trustees made two important decisions, which will stand the School in good stead for a long time.

The first decision was to re-affirm the School’s Episcopal and Anglican identity. Looking out on the national and worldwide church scene, we all know there are shoals ahead. Like the third panel in Thomas Cole’s 1837 painting The Voyage of Life, in which the hero is wringing his hands in his threatened bark and looking to Heaven for aid and succor, Episcopalians know we are in the middle of something.

But Trinity will stand. We know why we were founded and we know in Whom we have believed. We will stay true to our heritage no matter what.

The Board also re-affirmed the missionary global stance of the School. We see ourselves as pro-active in forming leaders, men and women, for worldwide evangelistic service wherever they are needed and wherever they are called, from Flint to Chevy Chase to Palo Alto to Gaza to Tora Bora to Bora Bora to Kampala to Cochabamba. Alf Stanway helped start us on this road, and while it may look “long and winding” (Lennon/McCartney), it is really straight as an arrow, from Galilee to the ends of the earth.

The Board unanimously spoke for a School that forms for ministry and for mission.

So things in Ambridge are secure. Our confidence is in One who called and calls. There have been a few transitions, but that is only right when faced with new occasions and new duties. I look around and I see faculty searches that are most promising. I see Hartwell Smith following in the footsteps of Wicks
Stephens, who is now on the Board again, by the way. I see Peter Moore teaching preaching. I look out myself on two packed classes of our students. I also see the Family Focus Resource Center in brand new use, big time. It was just dedicated a few days ago and already it is jumpin’.

Send us your students, send us yourself, send us your financial support, send us your bishop to “check us out,” help us help the sufferers and sinners who are always the object of Christ’s Love, try us online, offer us your ideas, come and visit us, this quite unsheltered enclave in downtown Ambridge.

We need you, each of you who reads this, as never more. And we are ready to be that praying man in the Thomas Cole painting, looking only unto... Him, the Pioneer and Perfecter.

Devotedly, ever,

Paul

P.S. Cole’s painting is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where its four parts are given a “room of her own” (Dean’s contest).