Two Foundations Back a Pasadena Seminary’s Bid to Connect a Scattered Field

Pasadena-based Fuller Theological Seminary announced last week that the Henry Luce Foundation and the Imago Dei Fund have backed its effort to help launch a network of Christian peacebuilders. Fuller said it will serve the network in a backbone role — fostering collaboration, shared learning and stronger connections — through the Center for Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation it established last year.

The center works from Fuller’s Pasadena campus on North Oakland Avenue, the seminary’s home since 1953.

The seminary framed the effort against increasing polarization, social fragmentation and declining trust in churches, communities and institutions — conditions it said have drawn a growing number of organizations into peacebuilding and conflict transformation.

It builds on conversations among practitioners, ministry leaders, scholars and funders who, Fuller said, have increasingly recognized a need for deeper collaboration.

At a recent gathering at Rose Castle in the United Kingdom, the announcement said, leaders from a range of organizations found that peacebuilding work has expanded significantly while many organizations still operate independently on similar challenges.

Fuller said deeper collaboration can accelerate learning, reduce duplication of effort, surface promising practices and increase collective impact. Neither the seminary nor the funders disclosed the size of the commitments or a launch date.

“Across the country, remarkable organizations and leaders are helping communities navigate conflict, rebuild trust, and pursue reconciliation,” Fuller President David Emmanuel Goatley said in the announcement. “The opportunity before us is to strengthen the connections among those efforts so that learning, innovation, and resources can flow more freely.”

Christy Vines, the center’s founding executive director, said in the same announcement that “lasting change requires more than individual programs or isolated efforts.” She added: “It requires trusted relationships, shared learning, and the ability to build on one another’s strengths.”

Fuller’s trustees approved the center at their May 18 and 19, 2025, meeting in Pasadena. It was formed with the Ideos Institute, which dissolved as an independent entity; Vines, who had led Ideos as president and chief executive officer, became inaugural executive director.

The announcement also carried statements from two outside leaders. Michael Gulker, president of The Colossian Forum, said the challenges facing churches and communities today “are too complex for any one organization to address alone.” Lisa Jernigan, co-founder of Amplify Peace, called the effort “a trusted table where leaders, scholars, practitioners, and organizations can build relationships.”

The Henry Luce Foundation, established in 1936 by Time co-founder Henry R. Luce, makes theology grants to seminaries and divinity schools. The Imago Dei Fund is a private Boston foundation.

Fuller has been in Pasadena since 1947, when radio evangelist Charles E. Fuller and Boston pastor Harold John Ockenga founded it as an evangelical graduate school to train pastors and missionaries. Early classes met in Sunday school rooms at Lake Avenue Congregational Church, with offices at the Cravens Estate, before the 1953 move to purpose-built Payton Hall. It is named not for Charles E. Fuller but for his father, Henry. The multidenominational school later added schools of psychology and intercultural studies and now counts thousands of students and alumni worldwide.

Chief Financial Officer Ray Asad said in 2023 that Fuller is staying in Pasadena. The campus resumed in-person classes on January 21, 2025, two weeks after the Eaton Fire began; an emergency fund for affected faculty, staff and students had drawn $375,000 by August 2025.

“In a fragmented world,” Jernigan said in Fuller’s announcement, “the way we work together is itself a witness to the reconciliation we hope to see.”