This September, Emmanuel College will launch a new program that its creators hope will revitalize theological education.
Founded in 1928 and associated with the United Church of Canada, Emmanuel College is a constituent college of Victoria University in the University of Toronto.
The two-year Teaching for Ministry (TFM) program has been made possible by a $500,000, five-year grant from the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc. It will produce “scholars”¦uniquely prepared to teach the next generation of the church’s ministers,” said a statement by Mark Toulouse, principal of Emmanuel College.
Regarding “what educators perceive as a gap between academic experience and hands-on ministerial work”: If the photographer had gone through the door in the picture and straight out the back of the building, he would have seen the cross in the garden on which hangs the figure of a naked woman. What does that tell the person in the pew about what is being taught inside the building? And how on earth can it properly nourish those who are “really hungry for the spirituality of Jesusâ€? Such is the way of the United Church of Canada (in which my parents were married and I was baptized) and its essentially Samaritan spirituality.