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Vision Statements and Strategic Goals
A. Global Christianity Summary Vision Statement
That Asbury Theological Seminary, committed to “spread Scriptural holiness throughout the world,” will be globally positioned to equip, train, serve, and support the world Christian movement. The official seal of Asbury Theological Seminary contains the words, “the whole Bible for the whole world.” From our founding in 1923, Asbury Seminary has been committed to engaging the whole world. This is also reflected in our mission statement, which declares that we are to “spread scriptural holiness throughout the world.” The twentieth century witnessed a dramatic, seismic shift in the ethnic and cultural demography of Christianity. For the first time in over 1,300 years, the majority of Christians are now found outside the Western world. Vibrant, often indigenous, expressions of Christianity are emerging across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Furthermore, the demographics of North American Christianity is also changing, fueled primarily by new waves of immigrant communities in the West. In order to respond to this shift, Asbury Seminary must reconceptualize itself as more than a regional or denominational outpost for theological and pastoral training. Furthermore, the increasingly post-Christendom, missional realities of North America call for Asbury Seminary to recapture our vibrant history in producing evangelists and church planters.6
Strategic Goals (1) By 2023 Asbury Theological Seminary will be a leader in training church planters for postChristendom North America as well as doctoral-level education for leaders of global church planting movements.7 We will secure a full-time professor of church planting to be housed in the E. Stanley Jones School of World Missions and Evangelism. Church planting is the embodiment of the New Creation in communities of men, women, and children who live out the future realities in the present as a form of witness, service, and love. Asbury Seminary, in 2023, will not only train church planters but also will be a leading center in a global network of church planting initiatives. We look to the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism to bring leadership to this initiative. We anticipate that, by 2023, 40 percent of our student body will include church planting as a significant, if not primary, focus of their ministry. (2) By 2023 Asbury Theological Seminary will deploy on all of our campuses and extension sites a faculty conversant with trends and emerging movements in global Christianity and fully 6
Global Christianity, Presidential Charge (1, 2). Global Christianity vision team paper envisions “an Asbury Seminary that recognizes the need of church planting in the majority world, and also in the secular West” (11). Church Renewal and Revitalization and Church Planting also calls for “a course of study in cross-‐cultural church planting” (65). There are strong missiological reasons for considering changing the name of the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism to the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Church Planting. Evangelism is, after all, about creating communities of believers who manifest the full realities of the New Creation in the present. 7