The House of the Epiphany

Situated in the wooden Anglican compound overlooking the main city thoroughfare (McDougall Road – named after the first Anglican missionary and Bishop in Sarawak) is the House of the Epiphany, the theological seminary of the Diocese of Kuching. It was opened in 1953 during the episcopate of Bishop Nigel Cornwall. Beside training candidates for ordination, the House serves as a center offering refresher courses for the local clergy and lay leaders.

Initially progress was slow but from the start it was never allowed to deter the aim to build up the church with explicit intention of preparing locally-born Christians for the ordained ministry. 105 years elapsed after the first missionaries landed in 1848 before the local Church was ready to embrace the much-touted policy of self-propagating, self-supporting and self-governing. The admission of then students under the tutorship of Canon Peter Howes for the sacred ministry signaled a historic breakthrough in the process of transferring the leadership to the locals.

The main college building has 18 student’s room, a chapel, library, dining hall and common room, washrooms and a staff quarters. Adjacent nearby is a detached lecture room which separates the Warden’s House from the main building.

We live in an instant society. Microwaves, remote control and the Internet give us what we want in seconds. So it is not surprising that many Christians long for instant conversions, too. But this instant mentality can lead to insensitive encounters that many may look more like fast-food outlets than a growth process into maturity in Christ. In our post-modern age, sharing the gospel takes times, ingenuity and incarnational love. This means living the way Jesus lived, forging authentic relationships and speaking the language of the culture. That is precisely what the House of the Epiphany is committed to equip its students to become. Here they learn to not only exegete he text, but exegete the context as well. By understanding the original message and the contemporary situation, students interpret and translate the unchanging gospel into words and images that make sense to the people in the local context and culture.