Trinity Anglican Seminary Goes ‘Whole Candlestick’

High Church Day’ Eucharist at Trinity’s New Good Shepherd Chapel | Trinity Anglican Seminary

By Jeff Walton

JUICY ECUMENISM

July 8, 2025

Fifty years after its founding as an institution seeking to renew the Episcopal Church, Trinity Anglican Seminary now seeks to establish itself as a central hub within the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and broaden beyond its history of low churchmanship.

Inaugurated in 1975 as Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, the school in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, restyled itself as Trinity Anglican Seminary in 2024.

The change to incorporate Anglican in the institution’s name was noteworthy as an increasing number of Protestant institutions eschewed denominational labels, perceiving them as less marketable as nondenominational Christianity grew. But Trinity’s new name signaled a change in more than just branding.

“We seek to educate ‘the whole candlestick,’” said the Rev. Alex Banfield Hicks, Trinity’s director of leadership development. Hicks led a campus tour for delegates to the ACNA Provincial Council, which met June 18-20 at the school’s newly consecrated Trophimus Center, which is named for the companion of St. Paul mentioned in Acts and 2 Timothy.

Formerly Union Presbyterian Church, the center and its Good Shepherd Chapel were consecrated on May 16 by ACNA Archbishop Emeritus Robert Duncan, opening the space as a conference and events facility. Expansion of Trinity’s campus has come as a number of other seminaries have either liquidated properties to free up cash and reduce debt or have concluded residential programs and shifted to online and hybrid models of education. Most recently, Luther Seminary has announced plans to move from its historic campus in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Provincial Council served as something of a “coming out party” for Trinity as a school specifically aiming to form seminarians for ministry within ACNA. While the school is not unfamiliar to most ACNA clergy and bishops (several ACNA diocesan bishops are graduates) it has expanded its reach and in May of 2024 reported an 89 percent increase in applications over the previous year.

In the autumn of 2024, Trinity counted 132 students and eight faculty, according to data provided by the Association for Theological Schools, the accrediting body for North American seminaries. While small compared to many Southern Baptist or evangelical seminaries, that is larger than the enrollment of most Episcopal seminaries, a number of which have consolidated in recent years.

Trinity continues to offer the option of a fully residential program, something that at least half of the remaining Episcopal schools no longer offer. Church Divinity School of the Pacific concluded residential study in 2023. General Theological Seminary announced in 2022 that it would no longer admit new residential students.

Trinity quietly disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church in January 2022. Trinity’s dean, the Very Rev. Canon Bryan C. Hollon explained it had become difficult to continue presenting both denominations as equally valid ministry options when Episcopal officials held different theological commitments than Trinity’s leaders. It was also noteworthy that fewer and fewer postulants for ordination within the Episcopal Church were coming to Trinity, and those who were attending were doing so without the support and direction of their diocesan bishops.

Concurrently, more ACNA bishops directed their future clergy to Trinity, as did a number of overseas Anglican provinces, especially in the Global South, where the Anglican Communion is consistently growing. Trinity counts several Global South bishops among its alumni, including those serving dioceses in Chile, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Tanzania.

While most of Trinity’s students are Anglican, the school has ecumenical aspects: Presbyterian and Lutheran students study alongside their Anglican colleagues in programs overseen by the North American Lutheran Church and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. These are evangelical denominations that share some of the “mainline-adjacent” attributes of the ACNA, with a significant number of their local churches formerly connected with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), just as many ACNA parishes were part of or planted by those who once were laity and clergy within the Episcopal Church.

Trinity’s “whole candlestick” commitment, a reference to high church and low church traditions, is an effort to differentiate it from some of its peer institutions. Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin historically educates students seeking to minister within the high church or Anglo-Catholic traditions, while receiving recognition by both the Episcopal Church and the ACNA.

Meanwhile, a number of evangelical seminaries have initiated ACNA-recognized Anglican tracks of study, including Asbury Theological Seminary, Beeson Divinity School, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Regent College. Hicks and Hollon speak positively of these institutions as connecting evangelicals “on the Canterbury Trail” with Anglicanism, but emphasize Trinity’s 50-year role as being a distinctly Anglican institution.

In this regard, Trinity has at least one parallel with Virginia Theological Seminary, the largest seminary training clergy for ministry within the Episcopal Church. Established in 1823, VTS was a place of education within the low-church, reformed expressions of Anglicanism. With the diminishment of General Theological Seminary, a “broad church” school, VTS similarly widened its churchmanship in order to step into the role General once occupied.

Now, aspects of sacramental, Anglo-Catholic worship such as chasubles are seen there, which was not the case less than 100 years ago.

VTS, which similarly educates in a residential model, now shares the same institutional leadership with the much smaller General Seminary. General now exclusively offers a hybrid model of remote learning and on-campus intensives at a few points in the academic school year.

For its part, Trinity now introduces its students to a range of Anglican liturgical practices, including a “high church” day with an Eastern-facing Eucharist.

“We really did it up for annual ‘high church’ day this year,” said the Rev. Canon Wes Jagoe, Trinity’s chaplain and director of the Trophimus Center. Jagoe listed Ad Orientem worship, incense, sung liturgy and prayers of the people, oblations, ablutions, eucharistic vestments, appareled [decorative] albs, tunicled crucifer, sung Gospel responses, verger, and bells as among the aspects included in high-church worship. “It is great to demonstrate for students the full spectrum of Anglican practices.”

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