What is the world in which we live at the beginning of the third millennium?

• A world in which many nations are struggling to establish and maintain viable democratic governments and productive economies with protections of human rights.

• A world in which disparities in wealth, availability of health care, clean water, and mortality rates vary greatly between northern and southern hemispheres and within countries everywhere.

• A world in which freedom of religion, speech and the press is often violated, and access to educational opportunities, learning resources and cultural exposure is widely restricted.

• A world in which Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted within the space of a century from the northern to the southern hemisphere, where some of the most momentous action in World Christianity is occurring today.

• A world in which today’s most ‘representative’ Christianity is no longer European or North American but Latin American, African, and Asian.

• A world in which tremendous differences and lack of understanding exist among the world’s different religions and philosophies.

• A world in which Christianity is divided against itself in terms of basic understandings of human sexuality, economic systems and the relation of creation to ecology and evolution.

• A world in which bio-engineering, geo-engineering and social systems-engineering are reconstituting our life worlds with little theological or ethical guidance.

This world is also:

• An endangered world in which both very high consumption patterns and the desperate efforts of the very poor to get food, shelter and fuel threaten the environment.

• A changing world in which digital technologies and communications media are reshaping the ways people live, work, think, relate, understand and practice their faith.

• A competitive world in which explosive new opportunities in science, law, business and medicine draw many of the best and brightest young people into non-clerical professions.

• An engaging world in which the discourse of theology, the guidance of ethics and the practice of ministry are moving into settings that extend far beyond congregations.

• A shrinking world in which large developing societies – China, India, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa and Nigeria – will challenge every hegemony.

• An expanding world order in which new transnational institutions and movements – the World Bank, IMF, WTO, corporations, Non-Governmental Organizations – limit the sovereignty of nation-states, and blur national and cultural boundaries.

There are other factors, of a particularly western kind, which affect an institution of learning such as ours. As part of our context, we see:

• The rapid increase in the breadth of knowledge in modernity, together with a conviction that its range must be assimilated

• A consequent externalizing of learning as fact-like information, which is then “learned” in isolation from its implications for human participation in growth and wholeness

• A displacement of accepted authorities in truth and morals

• Stable forms of life – including the Christian faith – are destabilized by a series of complex causes

• Increasingly diverse corporate expressions of Christian conviction and practice in America, (some in continuity with traditional ecclesial forms and denominational norms, but many discontinuous with these traditions) which are shaped by (a) distinctive ethnic and/or generational cultures and (b) an array of musical traditions.

• Social fragmentation by resurgent identity politics, fundamentalist militance, cultural clash, and visible increases in economic inequality.

• A proliferation of information and “values” through IT

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