Our Vision
The Diocese of the Holy Trinity is a missionary diocese. The mission is two-fold. First, it is a mission for the renewal of the spiritual life in the Anglican tradition. This mission begins within each church and mission community with a renewed commitment to the Life of Prayer in community, with a focus on the conversion of heart and spiritual growth of each member. Second, it is a mission to an increasingly post-Christian (and pre-Christian) world. The mission is to be faithful witnesses for Christ in the world and to invite people into the life of Christ we experience and celebrate together in our communities.
We believe these two missions are integrally related. The mission of the church in the contemporary western world has often been reduced to marketing religious products to religious consumers. This reflects the church’s unwitting adoption of the consumer culture values. In contrast, authentic mission means to be witnesses for Christ in the world and call people to repent and live a new and different kind of life in Him. The starting point for mission is the planting and cultivating of that life. We cannot give to others what we do not have.
What we have must also be shared. Many traditionalists have viewed their faith and the church as a shelter from an increasingly hostile world. In such cases, the church becomes a bunker for the like-minded with no sense of mission in the world. Many churches need both interior renewal and a renewal of their heart for reaching the lost and wounded in the world. Genuine interior renewal necessarily leads to mission. If we experience the love of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit will give us a natural impulse to share our experience with others.
We believe that both renewal and mission are communal. Life in Christ is experienced in the communion of the Saints; an effective mission to the world requires the gifts of all the members of the body (cf. Ephesians 4:16). In our culture, salvation tends to be understood in individual terms.In the Bible, however, salvation involves the restoration of human relationships as well as our relationship with God. We are saved as the Body of Christ, not merely as a collection of individuals. Only the cultivation of genuine relationships in the Body of Christ can answer the loneliness that is epidemic in our world. Only a new and renewed community that lives together in communion with God can provide an answer for the breakdown of families, the thinness of human community created by social and other media, and the false vision of lives dedicated to economics, pleasure, and the other idols of our time.