From the Interim Dean and President

Hands Across the Sea: Mutual Ministry in the Body of Christ

One of the blessings of being Anglicans is the global, multicultural family of churches and provinces with which we are in fellowship and/or contact. This enables mutual ministry to take place and all sorts of rich, personal friendships. Short term mission trips, sending and receiving students, and diocese-to-diocese partnerships all offer opportunities.

In this flow of fellowship and ministry, educational institutions also have their place. In quite a variety of ways Trinity is involved in mutual ministry with other Anglican evangelical seminaries around the globe. This issue of Seed & Harvest will spell out some of these partnerships. In them it is Trinity’s aim to help the other seminaries grow in academic resources. We send books, duplicates usually from our collection; we send professors (not duplicates of course!) for short periods of time and for intensive teaching; and we serve by offering online courses around the world, taught from Ambridge or sometimes from the professors’ homes. Such courses can be taught “live” with students participating from the United States, Africa, Canada and Egypt all at the same time.

The great hope is that by such exchanges and mutual support, we at Trinity may actually help elevate the level of instruction in seminaries in countries that cannot send their teachers overseas in large numbers. We for our part always receive more from those whom we serve than we give. No one comes back from Egypt, for example, without learning a great deal about a Christian way to live with and witness to Muslims or a vivid sense of Church history having been in or near the home of Athanasius, Tertullian and Augustine. And no one returns from a time in Africa without being humbled by a new sense of the difficulties we in the West created for African nations by the uninformed national boundaries we created after WWI. We see the central role that the power of the gospel must play to enable the peace and unity we all desire for our brothers and sisters there, and we have a deeper awareness of the power of the gospel to convert and transform people. In addition, it is these friendships and this fellowship that provide the context for our receiving the wonderful international students and teachers that come to live and study and teach with us, as described in a recent issue of Seed & Harvest.

This history of mutual ministry also lies behind the welcome we evangelical Anglicans in the US and Canada have received from the Global South during this time of turmoil in the Church. This June, at the coming Global Anglican Future Conference in Israel, there will be a meeting of old friends with whom we have been long in mutual ministry and an opportunity to make new friends and explore new ministry.

We would be much the poorer spiritually and relationally without this ministry. Enjoy reading about this wider reach of Trinity in this issue, and join us in prayer for the support to continue to reach our hands across the sea.

Warmly in the Lord Jesus,

+John