There are people who don’t make a lot of noise, who don’t put themselves forward, who do not deliberately call attention to their expertise, but just get things done. In the years I have taught at Trinity School for Ministry, I have learned that (now retired) Bishop Grant LeMarquand is that kind of person.
Grant has officially worn two hats at Trinity. He taught both New Testament and Missions. I first learned about the latter when I was interviewing at Trinity and was introduced to Grant. I mentioned that I liked the theology of Karl Barth, and Grant mentioned that Barth is not much read in Africa because of his negative views on religion. Africans, he pointed out, are a very religious people, and any approach to missions that simply disregarded religion would not be an effective mission strategy in Africa.
Trinity has a unique focus on missions, and during my first few years here, I learned that missions is one of Grant’s major concerns. Grant regularly went on short trips to teach in Africa, and I was surprised a few years after I arrived when Grant announced that he would be leaving Trinity because he had been asked by Bishop Mouneer Anis of Alexandria, Egypt to serve as Anglican Bishop of the Horn of Africa. Grant had initially thought that he and his wife Wendy would be serving a few thousand local Ethiopians, but because of a war in South Sudan, Gambela became the center of a crisis involving hundreds of thousands of refugees, and Grant and Wendy found themselves in the middle of that crisis. During their time in Ethiopia, Grant and Wendy served growing congregations, ministered to refugees, began a seminary, and Wendy used her skills as a physician to teach basic health care to mothers of children, which contributed to a significant lowering of infant deaths. Because of Wendy’s health problems, Grant and Wendy had to return to the US after five years, and Grant once again wore both his NT hat as well as his missions hat at TSM.
During the time we overlapped at Trinity, Grant was Academic Dean, he started and edited a Trinity Journal for Theology and Ministry, he was the Anglican member of a Roman Catholic group of African biblical scholars, he published numerous essays on African biblical exegesis, he began The Marjorie Stanway Collection of African Bibles, Prayer Books and Hymnals, one of the largest collections of African Bibles in the world, he was Director of the Stanway Institute for Mission and Evangelism, he was actively involved in the triennial New Wineskins for Global Mission Conference, and he served as a bishop in the ACNA College of Bishops.
Most people who know about Trinity School for Ministry are probably not aware of what a significant role Grant played in Trinity’s life while he was here, and specifically how central he has been for Trinity’s focus on Global Mission. Yet for those of who worked with him, he was simply Grant, our colleague and friend who was always glad to spend a few minutes in conversation if you passed him on the way to the copy machine outside his small office.
A week before Grant and Wendy moved back to Canada, my wife Jennie and I had them over for dinner, and we talked about what Grant would be doing during his retirement. During that conversation he mentioned casually that although he would not be teaching full time, he would still have plenty of work to do as an Anglican bishop. Afterwards, I thought about how I had just had dinner with someone who had been an Anglican Bishop in the Horn of Africa, was an important contributor to the relatively unknown field of African biblical studies, and had played such an important role in the global mission of Trinity School for Ministry. But for me, he will always be “Grant.”
