Embracing Holistic Mission
Equipping Kingdom Servants
Stephen Lee
President
Dr Perry Shaw first visited CGST on 17 September 2012 to help us launch a major curriculum review exercise for the Graduate School. The past five years have witnessed almost half of our Faculty members going into retirement. Were it not for the good hand of our Lord, we would not be able to maintain our full strength during this historic time of transition, not to mention the will and determination of working together as a team in drafting from scratch an innovative curriculum, which we plan to implement in consultation with our students, alumni, church pastors, and lay leaders for the upcoming academic year of 2018-19.
In-depth and earnest discussions of the new curriculum begins with reshaping our ‘Vision and Mission Statement’. CGST’s first ‘Vision and Mission Statement’ was written back in 1995 by the then Vice President, Rev Dr Carver Yu, and has been publicized in subsequent years through our school Catalogue and website. After much deliberation, our Faculty has decided to keep the original four foci of the Statement unchanged:
- Since the founding of our school, CGST has followed God’s guidance to be ‘rooted in Hong Kong and committed to China’.
- As our solid theological confession, CGST has endeavored without ceasing to ‘uphold the evangelical faith and embrace the missional mandate’.
- Being a graduate school of theology, CGST remains resolute in our task of ‘shaping holistic pastors and nurturing spiritual leaders’.
- To be true to our divine calling, CGST will continue the relentless effort in ‘pursuing scholarly excellence and rising to the challenges of our times’.
In the new Statement, we aim to articulate succinctly both the commitment and aspiration of CGST Faculty for divinity training in the context of the Chinese Church. This foundational document describes how we attempt to integrate our critical reflections with pedagogic practice, a collaborative effort among our learned colleagues coming from diverse scholarly disciplines and various front-line exposure. Together we try to delineate the common goal and direction for our school in the next decades to come.
Vision and Mission Statement
China Graduate School of Theology
As an interactive learning community focused on equipping Christian disciples, China Graduate School of Theology is committed to upholding the evangelical Christian faith while staying in touch with our current social and cultural milieu. Theological education has always been for us a dynamic spiritual movement beyond an academic institution: cultivating servant-leaders for the kingdom of God, undertaking the holistic mission in partnership with the Chinese Church, bearing witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and for the transformation of our Father’s world.
Rooted in Hong Kong and committed to China
CGST follows the calling from God to be stationed in Hong Kong with an unswerving commitment to China. We seek to serve the Chinese churches, both mainland and overseas, with fervent dedication and humble faithfulness. Our task is to shape future leadership in theological education, church and ministries. By exploring how the Christian gospel may constructively be contextualized in contemporary China, we endeavor to facilitate the Chinese Christian community at large to make a profound and effective impact through our practice of the evangelical faith for the renewal of society and culture.
Uphold the evangelical faith and embrace the missional mandate
CGST subscribes to the evangelical heritage of our Christian faith as the foundation of our school. In this unsettled time of chaos and disorder, fear and anxiety, we confess that the hope and salvation for our world remains to be found only in the revealed truth of the Bible and the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ. The gospel in essence requires an inseparable continuity between truthful proclamations and faithful practices by the Church, and hence we strive to develop kingdom servants to become passionately devoted in their calling to profess as well as living out the whole gospel for the whole world.
Shaping holistic pastors and nurturing spiritual leaders
CGST is convinced that the godly characters of all spiritual and pastoral leaders must be genuinely manifested in an integral and holistic life. It is through vigorous scholarship, spiritual formation, and fieldwork practicum that we are determined to equip for the Chinese Church an emerging generation of servant-leaders who are mature with visionary insights, prudent yet resolute in actions, conjoining wisdom with loving-kindness, perceptive but humble, and ready to undertake commitment even at the cost of self-sacrifice.
Pursuing scholarly excellence and rising to the challenges of our times
CGST emphasizes the pursuit of strenuous scholarship with an open, critical, and forwardlooking orientation. Indebted to the dogmatic legacy of our ecclesiastical sages in their ‘faith seeking understanding’ attempts, we aspire to venture an evangelical systematic approach to theological thinking for our Chinese Church. This comprises contextualizing our Christian gospel in different arenas of our current situation, rising to the various cries and challenges of our times, and exploring new and creative paradigms for our faith and work.
