A Strategy for Renewal
Trinity Anglican Seminary, #1
***This essay was published in the Spring/Summer 2024 edition of Seed & Harvest magazine. I share it here for those who may not have seen the magazine but have an interest in Trinity’s work.
Trinity Anglican Seminary was founded in the mid-1970s to renew The Episcopal Church from within. While many episcopal leaders were turning away from the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) Trinity sought to turn the church back to Jesus Christ by forming biblically faithful, evangelical Christian leaders to plant, renew, and grow disciple-making churches.
For more than four decades, Trinity’s identity and purpose were easy to understand and articulate. We were the subversives - an evangelical seminary struggling against the grain in an Anglican province going off the rails. In many ways, Trinity fulfilled its renewal mission with spectacular success. We became a vital center for Anglican renewal, and our graduates went on to lead influential ministries on every continent besides Antarctica.
Although the Episcopal Church has continued to struggle with apostasy and decline, many leaders who would go on to form the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and lead in the ongoing global realignment of Anglicanism were associated with Trinity as founders, professors, graduates, trustees, or faithful ministry partners. Looking to the future, we will do what we have always done: form Christian leaders for mission. Although our purpose will remain the same, our strategy for achieving it must change, for at least two reasons: (1) our ecclesial context has changed, and (2) the mission field of North America has changed.
Regarding our ecclesial context, Trinity is no longer working against the grain of an Anglican province drifting from Christian orthodoxy. Although we welcome faithful episcopal students, Trinity Anglican Seminary is now aligned with the ACNA and supports its leadership and mission unequivocally. This means we are no longer the subversives; we are a maturing institution committed to the long-term growth and development of the ACNA and to the ongoing renewal and realignment of global Anglicanism. Trinity is an institutional cornerstone upon which the ACNA and other faithful Anglicans can unify, strengthen, and flourish in ministry and mission. We are all-in and here to stay.
Regarding the North American mission field, western culture has changed in astonishing ways in recent decades. More than ever before, churches in North America minister in an increasingly foreign land. The virtues and vestiges of Christian civilization, once influential in nearly all aspects of our culture, have been largely rejected. This presents opportunities for our graduates, since Christian leadership is so obviously needed, but it also poses real challenges.
Paul writes in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind….” Formation today requires a more thoughtful and sustained “counter-formation” for our students, since the world’s seductions are hard to escape in our media saturated and increasingly broken culture. In this culture, we must be strategic about forming Christian leaders out of the world and more deeply into a faith community. And we must be more effective in preparing Christian leaders to “go” and make disciples by communicating the gospel clearly and compellingly.
In October of 2023, Trinity’s Board of Trustees formally approved a strategic plan to guide our work in this new ecclesial context and for the mission field of 21st century North America and beyond. In what follows, I summarize the four major goals of our Strategic Plan and explain just a few of the many ways these goals are already shaping our work.
Strategic Goal #1: Differentiate Trinity through excellence in Anglican Formation. In the bible, the word “formation” describes growth in Christ. In Galatians 4:19, Paul longs to see Christ “formed” in the Christians of Galatia. More commonly, Paul urges Christians to be “conformed” to Christ, as in Romans 8:29 and to avoid being conformed to the world, as in Romans 12:2. Formation requires putting off worldliness and putting on Jesus Christ through participation in his fellowship, as in Colossians 3:1-17. A well-formed Christian will not only have the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:15) but will love what God loves and will what God wills. At Trinity, hearts and minds are shaped through the rhythms of biblical, prayerbook spirituality and reformation teaching on grace through faith. Days begin and end with the daily office. The whole community gathers for a eucharistic service on Wednesdays, and four times each week faculty, staff, and students share a common meal. All of this occurs in Ambridge, PA where our students live and witness in a secular Pittsburgh neighborhood. This kind of distinctly Anglican formation in a Christ-centered, residential community is the “gold standard” for the ACNA. We will always prioritize residential learning even as we pursue excellence in formation for distance students, unable to relocate.
Strategic Goal #2: Provide robust Anglican Formation via multiple pathways. For more than 10 years, Trinity students have earned course credit through several “pathways,” including semester-based residential, weeklong intensives, and online classes. In the Fall of 2024, we are adding a new modality: the Church-based pathway, which will enable Trinity to partner with clergy and lay Christians in the formation of leaders in local Christian communities.
By the fall of 2024, we will have a parish-based course in missions and evangelism. Courses on the prayerbook, preaching, pastoral care, spiritual formation, and more will be ready the following year. Church based courses will entail a partnership between Trinity faculty and local mentors. However, some courses may be delivered exclusively in an apprenticeship model, overseen by a local mentor. The church-based pathway will enable us to be much more intentional about the formation of our distance student’s hearts and minds.
Strategic Goal #3: Serve the ACNA as no other seminary can. Formation at Trinity is grounded in the 2019 Book of Common Prayer and closely attuned to the Anglican Church in North America’s formational standards. Specifically, the ACNA College of Bishops requires that those preparing for ordained ministry are equipped in the following areas: Holy Scripture, Church History, Anglican Church History, Doctrine, Liturgics, Moral Theology & Ethics, Ascetical Theology, Practical Theology, and the Missionary Work of the Church. During the past year, we have revised our entire master’s curriculum and re-written all program goals and outcomes to ensure the ACNA standards are addressed thoroughly. Trinity’s learning pathways offer a deep immersion in Anglican doctrine, liturgy, and spirituality that is second to none.
Strategic Goal #4: Establish Trinity as a recognized leader in Anglican formation, globally. Trinity’s first Dean President, Bp. Alfred Stanway, served as a missionary in East Africa for 35 years and as bishop of Central Tanganyika for 20 of those years. Because of Bp. Stanway and others, global missions have been part of Trinity’s DNA from the very beginning. That will not change even as we seek creative ways to serve Anglican churches in Africa and other parts of the world. We will continue our Stanway Scholars program, which brings African students to Ambridge for residential training, but we will explore new opportunities to form leaders from Africa, Latin American, and elsewhere through online and church-based pathways. We will establish Trinity, even more firmly, as a leader in Anglican formation for the global church.
As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, Trinity was founded for renewal. Today, we see the fruit of that renewal work all around us, across the United States and throughout the world.
Biblically faithful Anglicans have found new wineskins in the ACNA, GAFCON, and the GFSA.
What we need now is the ongoing, Spirit led renewal of the hearts and minds of God’s people so that we may be “built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). Trinity Anglican Seminary is committed to that renewal work. We are all-in and here to stay.