In June St College’s College Jerusalem will welcome Joshua Bruner, the first of our Porter Scholars to serve at the College under the ten-year Porter Fellowship program in partnership with the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University, and the H. Boone and Violet M. Porter Foundation.

Joshua Bruner received his Masters in Divinity at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and his Bachelor of Arts at Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, where he was twice named a King Creativity Scholar. He served as a chaplain in the Intensive Care Nursery and Birthing Pavillion at the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. He is currently a Candidate for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.

While serving as the inaugural Porter Scholar, Joshua will also work one day a week with Jerusalem Peace Builders. This is an important part of the partnership with Berkeley and with the Porter Foundation. We hope that it will also strengthen the College’s engagement in the ministry of reconciliation and peace in our troubled land.

The College community is looking forward to welcoming Joshua in early June and looks forward to his many contributions to our life over the next six or seven months.

Joshua has offered the following personal reflections on his role with us:

Growing up in a deeply sectarian Christian denomination in Texas, I learned from an early age that abiding in community across difference was often difficult. If I wanted to understand someone, I needed to first listen to them genuinely, lovingly, and carefully, regardless of how incongruent their ideologies were from my own. I sincerely believe that one of the greatest challenges facing our world, and the Anglican Communion in particular, is the disrepair of genuine global relationships across cultural difference.

My final year in seminary, I had the pleasure to work with the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and the Rt. Rev. Ian Douglas. Bishop Douglas, who is deeply involved in the Anglican Communion, particularly through the Anglican Consultative Council, was a generous mentor and inspired me to engage the ties that truly bind the Anglican Communion, which are relationships developed through co-participation God’s mission.

St. George’s College offers a critical resource to The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. While visiting Jerusalem two years ago, I met Bishop Laura Ahrens who was on sabbatical and staying at St. George’s. She told me how it was restorative in her faith and ministry. I realized that St. George’s College is a unique place, both removed and also in the center. One is removed from their local context and yet deeply embedded in the historical land of scripture through study and spiritual reflection. While local retreats and continuing education courses help achieve these ends, the College operates on another level, incomparable to alternatives. Eagerly, I await the opportunity to engage this community and grown, learn, and serve.

When I graduated from college, I completed a service year in AmeriCorps through City Year (www.cityyear.org) in New York, where I led a team of ten corps members through a year of service at a public elementary school in the South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in the United States. Our team worked with students as literacy tutors, founded an afterschool program, and led other positive school climate events, including school dances and a school spirit week, among others.

My experience leading teams in AmeriCorps as a corps member and manager taught me about leadership ethics through practical experience. Later, while attending Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, I was inspired and became more deeply committed to the Christian ethic of a lively faith. This active and incarnate faith inspires an intellectual curiosity of scripture and theology, active engagement in our hurting world, and a commitment to deepened, expanded, and textured relationship with Jesus Christ. While I learned about leadership at City Year, Berkeley cultivated me into a distinctly Christian leader. My desire is to further develop as a globally conscious Christian leader, in our beautiful, fractured world through the Porter Fellowship through my residence at St. George’s College, in addition to my work with the Jerusalem Peacebuilders. I look forward to building relationships through service, and mutual discernment of and participationin God’s ongoing mission in Jerusalem and the regions beyond.