By Arden Berry | Staff Writer
Despite being on a Baptist campus, George W. Truett Theological Seminary provides theological education to an assortment of Christian denominations. To provide some of these students with distinctive classes and community, Truett Seminary is establishing the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies.
Rev. Matthew Aughtry, acting director of the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies, said a house of studies involves particular classes and community events.
“The best vision of it would be to think about a house in Hogwarts,” Aughtry said. “It is a way of designating students who are studying at a multi-denominational seminary such as Truett, but who belong to a particular denomination or tradition, such as Methodism, or in this case, broadly Anglicanism.”
According to the Truett Seminary website, distinctives of this house of study will include worships and gatherings, classes related to Anglican and Episcopal history and theology, relationships with the wider multi-denominational Truett community and preparation for denomination-specific ordination.
“We have been able with our partnerships and relationships to offer the classes students need to move towards ordination already,” Aughtry said. “Our hope, of course, in the future is to have a more robust and … a more formal understanding of what is required of students in the house.”
The first house of studies, launched in 2020, was the Wesley House for Methodist Truett students.
“That really gave us an imagination and a model for how we might begin offering similar services and resources to students outside of the traditional Baptist backgrounds,” Aughtry said.
Aughtry said there are currently 15 students part of either the Anglican or Episcopal Church in Truett Seminary who would be considered to be within this house of study.
“This particular house of studies began really out of recognizing that much of what it takes to have a house of studies was already in our midst,” Aughtry said.
One of these students is Kate Rojales, third-year seminary student from Atlanta, who said she was confirmed as an Anglican during her time at Truett.
“I grew up Catholic and had been in Baptist, non-denominational spaces for half of my life, and I think that when I was asking these kinds of questions about, ‘What is church?’ and ‘What does it really mean for us to be the body of Christ?,’ I was struggling with some of the answers, and so I think I really turned to Anglicanism,” Rojales said.
According to the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, Anglicanism is often referred to as a “bridge tradition” between Protestantism and Catholicism, though defining it strictly as either is complicated. Additionally, the Episcopal Church exists within the Anglican Communion.
“The Anglican Communion consists of all the churches in this relationship,” the website reads. “It includes more than 85 million people in more than 600 dioceses. The Anglican Communion is global, with members in 165 countries.”
Because of its global scale, Aughtry said Anglicanism especially fits with Baylor’s Pro Mundo mission.
“Anglicanism is really aimed at this beautiful project that we think fits the message and the mission of Baylor University, which is to educate men and women for worldwide leadership,” Aughtry said. “It is a worldwide communion of churches … and has leaders in churches in Africa, South Asia, Australia and really everywhere you can think of.”
The Anglican Episcopal House of Studies will be Truett’s newest addition in helping graduate students from across Christian denominations learn and use what they have learned in the world.
“Anglicanism is just one really faithful way to follow Jesus, and I think that us being here at Truett is a reflection of that,” Rojales said. “We ultimately are … simply Christian, and I think we share a lot of things. We do have our distinctives, but I think that having the house officially now is a great way to honor that.”
