Good news from across the border in the US is difficult to find nowadays. But this week, something good happened that restores our sense of balance in a world full of imbalances. For years, Trinity International University (TIU) in Illinois, USA, had run on a deficit, forcing the administration to offer all its courses online in 2023. Although one of the most prestigous private universities since 1897, the Christian university founded by the Evangelical Free Church of America found itself struggling with falling enrollment and an increasingly unmanageable debt-load. Evangelical Christian training was struggling. The plan by the end of 2026 was to sell the property it was on to repay the debt and to close the university. It would mark the end of an era. Then the Christian Canadian university, Trinity Western (TWU), stepped in. This past week, TWU announced that it would acquire the heart of seminary training at TIU, the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS). Faculty and staff at TEDS would migrate to come under TWU’s leadership and eventually to British Columbia, Canada, thus maintaining the long history of evangelical seminary training that had the influence of notable theologians as Gleason Archer, D.A. Carson, Norman Geisler, Wayne Grudem, and graduates such as Mark Batterson, Scot McKnight, Stanley Porter, and Jim Wallis. You may recognize Don Carson as the founder of the Gospel Coalition and Stanley Porter as the current president of McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton.
As I consider what God is doing, two things come to mind. The first is that the Kingdom of Christ goes beyond human political borders, and human disputes. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof” is found in two passages in Scripture (Psalm 24:1; 1 Corinthians 10:24). Did you notice that to the Psalmist, it is a call to be holy in the earth He created and to Paul, it’s the call to “seek good for your neighbour”. In the current tensions that we experience with our neighbour to the south, we need to have those same attitudes – to be holy in a flood of unholiness, and to seek good for our neighbour. Trinity Western University’s decision to take on TEDS is a risk in these financial times, but it’s based on a desire “to remain steadfast in its mission to train men and women to testify to the transformative power of the inerrant Word throughout the world while providing a critique of the competing ideologies that threaten the life of the church.” God’s purposes are more important than man’s tariff or political agenda. God’s Kingdom is greater than man’s petty battles. The second is that our focus cannot be on the anxieties of this world but on the love of God. Jesus summarized the weapons against anxiety in Matthew 6 in three simple thoughts, “God values you more than the birds of the air and the lilies of the field” (v 26), “God knows all that you need” (v 32), “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all the things that you think you lack will be added to you as well” (v 33). You will hear about TWU’s acquisition of TEDS likely only from Christian sources because it’s not important to the world. But if you do, remember the lesson: God’s Kingdom is greater; God’s love is wider.
Just Church
At Just Church, our call is to keep our eyes on Jesus, and thus be holy and loving in a world full of confusion. “The vision of Just Church is to establish a church in just the way Christ called the church to be – true to His Word, loving Him, loving one another, and loving the lost.”
