We, too, must persist

The main gate at Westminster College, Cambridge

In a recent blog entry (“In a Sea of Faces,” May 21, 2023), I mentioned Dr. Jonathan Soyars, a fellow Episcopal priest and member of the Society of Scholar Priests. He currently holds a position at Westminster College here in Cambridge and was kind enough to invite me to lunch at the College on Tuesday. Westminster College along with six other religious colleges (of which Ridley Hall is one) forms the “Cambridge Theological Federation” (CTF). These colleges are not part of the University of Cambridge but are affiliated with the university. They concentrate principally on teaching disciplines related to training clergy and, in this, are in some ways closer to the original conception of the main university colleges when they were founded centuries ago.

Lewis and Gibson
Founders of Westminster College

Westminster was founded in London in 1844 and only moved to Cambridge in 1899 following the gift of a prime site of land near the center of the city by two Scottish sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson. Although Lewis and Gibson were exceptional biblical scholars in their own right, they were never fully accepted by the Cambridge establishment. Two things stood in their way – they were not Anglicans, and they were not male. Nonetheless, to use a contemporary phrase, “they persisted.” Following an appeal for funds from the wider Presbyterian Church, the college commissioned a new building designed by Henry Hare, which was built between 1897 and 1899. In 1967 the college began to amalgamate with Cheshunt College, Cambridge, foreshadowing the eventual combination of the Congregational and Presbyterian churches that would form the United Reformed Church (URC) in 1972.

In our conversations, Jonathan noted how the situation at Oxford University differed – how colleges like Westminster became part of the university structure. Interestingly, he pointed out that those same colleges have pretty much disappeared. It seems that what might appear to us today as elitism and an attitude of exclusiveness, in the end, proved to be the motivation for the colleges of the CTF to maintain the independence of their respective missions – and their path toward continued survival. However, we also discussed how these same colleges are struggling, as are the seminaries of The Episcopal Church in the US. Just how we all respond to these challenges is part of what I have been reflecting upon during my sabbatical, and our discussions on Tuesday gave us both food for thought – and a motive to look for a time to “share a few pints” in the coming days!

The lesson for us in all this may be that God blesses us with resources for the day (not a literal day, perhaps). But when that day is complete, we are called to move on, to new horizons, to new destinations within God’s kingdom. Scripture tells us plainly, “My ways are not your ways, says the Lord.” (Isaiah 55:8) Our task is not to change God’s mind about that. Our ask is to discern just where God will lead us … and then to follow. Like the sisters who founded this college, we, too, must persist.