Home Christian News Mark Labberton Hopes His Successor at Fuller Seminary Will Be a Woman...

Mark Labberton Hopes His Successor at Fuller Seminary Will Be a Woman or a Person of Color

“I knew a lot of LGBTQ students who went to Fuller because they thought it would be a safer place and finding out that it’s not,” Eazell said.

Labberton said he couldn’t comment on the lawsuit or the overall LGBTQ climate at Fuller.

But he said he envisions his successor as someone who is “courageous and wise in trying to lean into what I would see as the urgency of what we’re calling ‘rethinking church’ in the 21st century.”

“It’s that effort to rethink church that seems to me to be best led by a person who actually looks like that future church,” Labberton said. “That motivates me very much to want to encourage that younger leadership, to create a way for that younger leadership to actually manifest itself at Fuller.”

To Labberton, rethinking church includes rethinking what it means for “Christian people to truly belong to one another” and “what Christian identity actually is.”

“We have to decide what is really Christian identity, which I would argue is centered in the evangel of God’s redeeming love, justice and mercy in Jesus Christ,” he said. “But, we have to really reclaim that because that seems to be murky and lost in the tide of a lot of other speech and action that’s confusing.”

Labberton said Fuller hopes to achieve this effort through its commitment to have the right racial and gender diversity across the institution, as well as through launching new degrees “to do a better job providing that kind of indispensable leader servant that we think the church is going to need.”

“I feel excited about that transition and believe that the person is coming into Fuller at a very positive and hopeful moment in our life,” he said.

This article originally appeared here.

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Molina most recently served as Journalist in Residence at the University of Southern California (USC) and as Equitable Cities Fellow at Next City. She has worked at The Press-Enterprise, La Prensa and OC Excelsior, and The Orange County Register. In 2018, she was named one of the 15 most influential Latina journalists by Latino Journalists of California. She has also received fellowships from the Center for Health Journalism at USC and the Institute for Justice and Journalism. Alejandra is a native Spanish speaker. She received her bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from the University of La Verne.