Asia Theological Association - History

History

ATA was established in 1970 as a direct outcome of the Pan-Asia Congress of Evangelism held in Singapore in 1968. Its appointed primary goal then was to promote evangelical theological education including lay training. Accreditation services were rendered to institutions in 1978. Since then, it has developed in serving its member theological institutions in teaching evangelical biblical theology and in the training of Christian pastors and church workers. Its operating principles include strengthening partnership, enhancing scholarship, furthering academic excellence, fostering spiritual and ministerial formation, and mobilizing resources to fulfill global Christian mission within diverse Asian cultures. The main reason for the establishment of ATA was to be an aid to theological institutions in contextualising theology in the Asian context. Through this Christian pastors and Christian churches can be aided to be more effective in supporting Christian ministry more effectively with other Asians in their own context. Today the majority of Evangelical Bible colleges in Asia are members of ATA.

Read more about this topic:  Asia Theological Association

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.
    Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)