Trinity College Purpose

The undergraduate program at Trinity International University prepares students to engage and influence their local and global communities through holistic Christ-centered liberal arts education. To accomplish this, TIU, as an academic community, commits itself to distinctive objectives:

  1. A Reasoned Belief in the Christ-Centered Focus of Truth
    A belief that:
    • Affirms a personal and loving God as source and sustainer of all created beings and values.
    • Proclaims Jesus Christ as liberator and Lord of individual and corporate living.
    • Appropriates Holy Scripture as God’s direct and definitive self-disclosure.
    • Discovers God’s continual self-revealing activity in every aspect of nature, life, and knowledge.
    • Provides illumination and significance to the quest for understanding in all its dimensions.
    • Engages in open-minded inquiry as an appropriate response of love to God.
  2. A Liberal Arts Approach to Learning
    An approach that:
    • Gives systematic exposure to the heritage of human experience.
    • Sharpens the ability to form significant questions and sound judgments.
    • Teaches consistency and comprehensiveness in thought and clarity, and coherence in expression.
    • Cultivates appreciation for the beautiful, the imaginative, and the delightful; as well as empathy for the unlovely, the commonplace, and the tragic.
    • Develops the human capacity to create, which reflects the creative power of God.
  3. A Sustained Interest in Every Participant
    An interest that:
    • Respects the dignity of each person as a unique image-bearer of God.
    • Takes seriously the particular concerns of current and former students, faculty and staff, administrators and trustees, and those in its various constituencies.
    • Supports each member in the integration of all the facets of his or her personal growth.
  4. A Purposeful Involvement in Contemporary Society
    An involvement that:
    • Subjects pervasive human problems to penetrating critical analysis.
    • Confronts deterioration and corruption in institutions as well as individuals.
    • Translates Christian compassion into redemptive social action, with special sensitivity to global injustice and ecological stewardship.
    • Points men and women, individually and collectively, to their ultimate need for God’s forgiving healing and grace.
  5. A Serious Attempt to Encourage Career Potential
    An attempt that:
    • Applies formal instruction to issues of current importance.
    • Offers guidance in the development of life-planning skills.
    • Emphasizes a range of vocational possibilities more than specific occupational training.
    • Promotes effective participation in the body of Christ.
  6. A Creative Balancing of Tensions Inherent in the Educational Process
    A balance that:
    • Sets and strives for high ideals, but confesses and struggles with flaws and limitations.
    • Allows for maximum realization of freedom and order, spontaneity and continuity.
    • Recognizes the necessary interdependence of reason and faith, reflective thinking and responsible acting.
    • Treats with tolerance and fairness ideas that are novel, traditional, simple, or complex.
    • Requires equally of all who teach and learn both careful research and effective communication.
    • Transmits Christian values while sustaining the exercise of individual moral decision.
    • Discriminates between need and excess in the use of natural and economic resources.
    • Distinguishes good from evil, but refrains from separating God’s universe into “sacred” and “secular” compartments.

Trinity College, as a Christian liberal arts college, is dedicated to exploring all knowledge and is committed to the fact that all truth is God’s truth. In part, this commitment entails engaging the culture and seeking to transform it for Jesus Christ. There is, therefore, an inherent tension between the search for God’s truth and the Christian’s engagement of culture. Ideas and issues, whether presented by the arts, literature, or sciences, are to be examined and evaluated in light of God’s inerrant and authoritative Word. Through this process students may on occasion experience some discomfort as aspects of human fallenness are studied. Students are encouraged to interact with their professors or Student Life personnel when such situations occur.