The University is, in other words, an institution that has de facto had delegated to it the holding of a significant portion of the Church’s memory
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That is, it is called to be responsive to the particular situation in which it is carried out, responsive to the particular gifts of the one ministering, responsive to the resources available in the immediate community. But it is also called to be responsible: answerable not just to that minister and that situation, but also to God, to the Bible, to the wider Church–and to earlier generations of the Church. Both by responsiveness and by responsibility, the Church’s mission is called to account–the practitioners of that mission slowed down and called to wait, and to pay attention.
Theological education feeds both responsiveness and responsibility, providing resources which enable attention to the specific difficulties of a particular location, but also constantly making connections with the wider Christian tradition: allowing what happens here to be called into question by a community which stretches in time and space far beyond the local.
