Date: July 23, 2026
Last March, a VTS cohort made a pilgrimage to Iona, Scotland, a small island located in the Inner Hebrides. Iona has served for nearly a century as the home of the Iona Community, an ecumenical movement dedicated to cultivating intentional community and renewing traditional Christian worship by grounding it within progressive social witness. So much of our shared life together at the ancient Iona Abbey truly felt like an image of God’s kingdom.
However, there was a thought that kept nagging at me: living in community is so much easier when everyone around you looks the same, thinks the same, and shares the same values. And if intentional community is only possible among the like-minded, what does that say about our capacity to build a community in the image of God’s kingdom here at VTS?
Despite much diversification of our student body over the last two years, we’ve still been as quick as ever to find our tribes. We gravitate toward those who share our piety, our grievances, and who believe the Church should look the way we believe it should look. And what results is less a “VTS community” and more a patchwork of communities: apartment people and dorm people, high church and low church, Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals; each with our own social rhythm and sense of superiority.
I can say wholeheartedly that the diversity of our student body is its greatest strength. Diversity enables us to see a clearer, more comprehensive image of who God is and how God operates in the world. But instead of leaning into the richness of our heterogeneity and challenging ourselves to see the inherent beauty of traditions and customs not our own, we arrive at seminary with staunch convictions about what Christian worship should look and feel like, and we decide early on that we will not be moved from them.
My vision for what a VTS community could be is rooted in a biblical portrayal of catholicity, one that has nothing to do with imposing a more Latin or Anglo-Catholic flavor of worship on everyone else. Indeed, to impose any one cultural-linguistic expression of Christianity feels more like colonization. True catholicity has to do with ensuring that the life of the Church is translatable across ethnicity, language, culture, and yes, denomination. Instead of wishing for uniformity, we should be doing the difficult work of holding together people who see the role of scripture, liturgy, and tradition differently, refusing to let that difference become the cause of bitter divisions and resentments.
I think often of how hard this must have been for the Jewish believers Paul addresses in his letter to the Romans, who were asked to accept that the uncircumcised – those Gentiles who did not share their traditions, customs, or indeed their entire framework for what religious membership entailed – were nonetheless full members of the body of Christ (cf. Romans 14:1-15:7). Paul did not ask his Jewish audience to abandon their convictions. Rather, he asked them to see that the body of Christ was much bigger than their convictions and their traditions could contain.
I’m not advocating for a seminary experience where everyone has to agree, or where all our theological and liturgical differences should dissolve into some flattened middle ground. No one should have to betray convictions they hold with integrity. But we also shouldn’t hide behind those convictions and simultaneously dismiss those who hold different beliefs.
If the Church that Paul envisioned could hold together Jews and Gentiles without the imposition of uniformity, then surely we, the classes of 2027, 2028, 2029, and beyond, can learn to build something more sacred than a disjointed collection of isolated communities. Let us stop squandering our diversity and instead let it be a reminder that Christ welcomes into himself all who abide in his command to love others (cf. John 15:4–10; 1 John 4:16). It is my own sincere hope that we can each reflect on this radical, Christ-like capacity for acceptance of difference, and ponder its implication for our future calls, vocations, and ministries.
Anthony Guadalupe Amato (M.Div. ‘27)
Senior Class President