Doctor Jenny Te Paa is Principal of Te Rau Kahikatea, College of St. John the Evangelist in New Zealand, and has recently become a Patron of Inclusive Church.

We interviewed Jenny to find out about her life and faith, and why Inclusion is so important to her.

Would you please tell us a little about your Journey of Faith?

I am a 'cradle Anglican'! Baptised as an infant and lovingly nurtured in my faith as a young person, I have remained actively involved with the Anglican Church throughout my adult life.

As an indigenous woman my faith journey has been heavily influenced by my profoundly humanitarian, social justice leaning, evangelical CMS forebears. My childhood formative liturgical influence was the 1662 Prayer Book but most frequently in the vernacular of my people - indigenous Maori. My ecclesiological formation was greatly influenced by my regular childhood experience of witnessing normative ecumenical cooperation.

As an adult I have been involved at the leadership level of parish and national church life for the past thirty years. My movement into leadership within theological education was not a conscious career planning choice! It occurred as a direct result of my secular and ecclesial activism in support of indigenous struggle for self-determination and redemptive justice. It was the elders of my tribal community who initially 'anointed' me into the trusted position of leadership in theological education that I have now held for the past 16 years.

Could you tell us about your work as Principal of Te Rau Kahikatea, College of St. John the Evangelist?

My work as Principal is to provide relevant, responsive and radically visionary theological educational leadership. My responsibility is to enable students to achieve at the highest levels of their chosen field of academic endeavour even as they are opened to being prepared as transformative agents for God's mission anywhere and everywhere in God's world. My dream is to prepare a small cadre of impassioned theological educators (including a significant number of minority and or indigenous women) to assume the numerous mantles of key educational leadership roles that all deserve to be eligible to hold.

What inspires you?

My faith! More specifically what inspires me is the courageous prophetic witness for God's justice undertaken so selflessly by so many good Anglicans across the Communion - what inspires me is the simple and yet unspeakably sublime beauty of the very best of traditional Anglican liturgy - what inspires me is participating in the indescribably precious experience of infant baptism, what inspires me is the indescribable joy inherent in those global Anglican friendship relationships established in the name of God's mission purposes - relationships which are utterly transcendent of superficial human differences, relationships which are utterly reflective of God's unerring blessing of the common humanity. What inspires me is being daily reminded of the unending miracle, which is God's abundant, mysterious, extraordinary, complex and stunningly beautiful creation in all its myriad forms.

Why do you think the Issues raised by Inclusive Church are important?

Because Inclusive Church is exemplary in it's insistence upon unconditional inclusion - it is this simple and yet profoundly important practice of unequivocal, all-inclusive ecclesial embrace, which is open to all the baptized, that I find most resonates with my lifetime experience of being an indigenous Anglican.

What would you say to those who are disillusioned by the Church's lack of progress in these matters?

We must never allow fear or despair overwhelm us and in this we can learn much from those whose example of unflagging faith in the face of the most horrific injustice and brutality which must surely inspire and encourage us to keep going!!

'We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us. It is in everyone. As we let our light shine we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others'. (From Mandela's 1994 Inauguration Speech).

What would you say to those who oppose many of our principles?

As one who has now served on a number of international Anglican Commissions I have had the privilege of meeting with so many Anglicans drawn from across the spectrum of doctrinal and spiritual preference and practise. One of the interesting characteristics I have noted of those organizations and of those leaders who in general terms hold to the more literalist view of Biblical interpretation and who insist upon describing themselves as the truly 'traditional' Anglican Church is that it is extremely rare to hear them use the language of love to describe anything of their experience of being Church. I would be fascinated to know why this is so?

What can the 'person in the pew' do to make things better in the Church?

I think the question is open to contestation! I believe those in the pews of our Churches are those to whom all leaders owe an incalculable debt of gratitude for staying the course and for holding strong to the faith. I think it is already those in the pews who are doing 'the better part' of God's mission work with consummate grace, abundant generosity and unquestioned integrity - for here are the Sunday School teachers, the social service workers, the flower arrangers, the church cleaners, the altar cloth embroiderers, the fundraisers, the youth group leaders, the parish nurses, the volunteers for everything from pew polishing to bell ringing!!

What do you think the future will hold for the Church?

I believe God wills for God's people only the very best!! Our responsibility as disciples, as Christian witnesses who happen to be Anglican is to create a global and local ecclesial environment of which God would be immeasurably proud. We have God's prescription for the beloved community. As Anglicans we have our global Anglican Communion as our beloved community.

In Chicago last year, I described the Anglican Communion thus, "Communion, as I witness it and as I have experienced it throughout my lifetime, is us, embodied in and for each other across the endless chasms of distance and difference. Communion is both noun and verb - it names both who we are and what we do. Communion is thus simultaneously the recognition of our common humanity, and the relationality that that presupposes - it is about us all being created equally of God, equally as it is our responsive embrace of God in each other. It is therefore our way of loving and our responsibility for loving, just as we ourselves are loved so unconditionally by God. Communion is thus us living out in the deepest and most intimate forms of Christlike relationality what we say, even as we pray, that we deeply, truly believe in one God, in one Lord Jesus Christ, in one holy and apostolic church”.

Thank you for your time Jenny, and for your inspirational words.