Yesterday we opened the forty-first year of this seminary. That is a long time for a small school in a small village outside Amsterdam to keep doing one thing: receiving people who have come from around the world — our records say some ninety nations — keeping them for a while, one year, two, three, four — and sending them on to serve the Lord somewhere else, usually a harder place.
We have come a long way. Tyndale came from prayer and generosity, from hope and vision, with limited financial and human resources. In an age when seminaries are closing their doors, we are welcoming new students. In an age when attention is the scarcest thing we have, we choose to study, worship, pray and eat together. In person, and in community with one another.
I read in a monastery leaflet once: time does not belong to the monk but to the Lord. So when the bell rings, the monk puts down his work and goes to pray.
We tell time here at Tyndale in trimesters. In the autumn we work toward Advent and Christmas. Through the winter we move through Lent to Easter Sunday and the resurrection. And in the spring we work toward Pentecost, and then ordinary time. Our calendar is not an administrative convenience. It is a claim about whose the time is.
To our new students — nineteen of you, from ten countries — welcome. You have had a week of being told things. Where the rooms are. How everything works. Which classes to attend and which deadlines are real. You have visited churches. You have cleaned this campus with your own hands. And this morning you sat in your first classes. Whatever you were imagining on your way here, you now have the beginning of the real thing.
Before you wrote a single sentence of theology here, you swept a floor with people whose languages you do not speak. That is not a preliminary to your formation. That is your formation, in miniature. We say that education here is holistic — head, heart, and hands — and we mean it.
Ten countries in one room is not yet unity. It is the raw material of unity. Sometime this year, someone will read a passage you have read all your life and hear something in it you cannot hear, and you will have to decide whether that is a threat or a gift. Both answers are available to you. We are one in Christ before we are one in agreement, and the first does not wait for the second.
To all our students, new and returning: sleep and rest matter for your studies as much as classes and reading do. You will find that you are learning at the lunch table, while cleaning the kitchen, on a walk, or serving someone at the counter of a McDonald's or a KFC.
To my colleagues: look how far we have come by the grace of God. Here we are at the beginning of another academic year. Through the prayer and generosity of churches and individuals, we are able to do what God has called us to do — to serve one another, and to serve the students God has entrusted to us in this season of their lives. And in the meantime, let us not miss the opportunity to grow deeper in our own faith and trust.
Consider what these past months have held. We ended last year in this very room, at graduation, saying goodbye to our graduating class. A few days later we welcomed over a hundred people for our Preachers and Leaders Conference. After the conference, Mezu and Emma arrived with their two boys, and this place became a Greek learning environment for the summer intensive. The Academy of Ancient Languages has just enrolled ninety students from every corner of the world. And on Wednesdays, nineteen Dutch residents will be here for the Equip lay preaching track.
What began here forty-one years ago has quietly become larger than what fits in this building.
Let me close with this.
You have come to be made into people through whom God can be recognised in everyday life — in a pulpit, in a hospital corridor, at a kitchen table, in a country that may not want you there, in a classroom, in an office where someone is being counselled, at a study table, raising children who are yours or someone else's, working a second job, leading organisations, feeding the poor.
All this takes longer than three years. But the journey starts tonight.
Welcome to Tyndale. Let us begin.
Szazsi Bene Vice President of Academic Affairs - September 2026
