What Robin Shugart thought would be a week of killing time in Toronto, because some dates didn’t line up during her sabbatical, became a week when God clearly invited her to start the MTS program at Wycliffe.
She remembers the evangelical Anglican roots of Wycliffe’s traditions jumping out at her on that weeklong visit. “It felt like an intersection of my primary faith communities,” she says. Shugart lives in Winnipeg, worships at an Anglican church there, and serves as campus director with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) for Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario.
Shugart began her MTS studies on a part-time basis, just before the pandemic started, and with her father’s cancer diagnosis a sorrow that arrived the following year. The consistency and structure of having to do one course a semester became the container in which she began to engage God and to grow during a season when the world at large, and her personal world, were in flux.
Almost six years in, it is in that container that she has enlarged her understanding of how to learn academically and intellectually about God and His love for her. Indeed, studying at Wycliffe has affirmed her place at IVCF as she’s applied her theological learning to the pastoral teaching that marks much of her IVCF ministry.
Shugart was taking a course on Christian worship during the semester when her father passed away. In that course, she learned that her participation by presence in worship, no matter its liturgical form, was a profound invitation into community with the Trinity. “That was incredibly freeing to hear—that I could just show up. God was present even though all I could do at the time was go through the motions.”
For Shugart, her learning in this course underlines what her whole experience at Wycliffe has been and will continue to be—a sign of God’s love for her. “I’m studying because God loves me!”
