Faculty Vision Statement

As teachers in a graduate professional divinity school rooted in Baptist traditions, we prepare ministers in partnership with the churches and nurture distinct ecclesial identities in an ecumenical community of learning, care and worship.

Confessing that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news of God that has power to transform both persons and societies,

We are firmly and unapologetically rooted in Scripture and biblical faith;

We are committed to justice and solidarity with the oppressed and to fostering diversity and hospitality in the divinity school, in the churches and in societies, in the tradition of the "social gospel;"

We are committed to the renewal of the church and the church's mission in the distinctive traditions of the 19th-century evangelical revival and the abolition and suffrage movements of western New York;

We are faithful to these unique traditions for the sake of a life-giving future for all God's people;

We affirm the integrity of faith and intellectual inquiry, and seek to prepare women and men for Christian ministry that is pastoral, prophetic and learned;

We choose to live and work in ways that are interdisciplinary and that interrelate the church and the academy, spiritual formation and learning, theory and praxis, convinced that making connections can creatively embody the gospel globally and locally.

In all this we are committed to breaking down the dividing wall of hostility between those who cherish the traditions of the past and those who are radically open to the future, thereby fostering a community in which the love of God is made manifest in human faces.