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On January 29, 2006, The McMichael Lecture Series welcomed Rev. Dr. Fred Burnham, former Director of Trinity Institute, to
speak at St. Paul's, Fayetteville.
When planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the Rev. Dr. Fred Burnham, as Directory of Trinity
Institute, was hosting the Most Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, then the Archbishop of Wales, at Trinity Church, just one block south
of Ground Zero. Both Burnham and Bishop Williams, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, thought they were going to die many
times that fateful morning. Burnham threw himself into the recovery effort, becoming a night supervisor at the relief ministry
for emergency workers that emerged at St. Paul's, a chapel of Trinity Church, directly across the street from the World Trade
Center site.
Since the recovery operation closed down in 2002, Dr. Burnham has been traveling the country speaking about the holistic
healing process at St. Paul's Chapel that brought about the miraculous transformation of countless lives at Ground Zero.
Through stories about heroic acts of goodness and compassion in the face of desolation, Burnham seeks to contribute to the
creation of a new global sense of human dignity and solidarity.
In his morning lecture, A Foretaste of the Kingdom: Finding God at Ground Zero, Burnham shared his impressions of that
pivotal time. "As a night supervisor of the ministry at Ground Zero, I watched as a totally random but amazingly gifted
gang of volunteers spontaneously organized themselves into the most loving and compassionate community of ingenious human
beings that I have ever known a vivid and dramatic foretaste of God's kingdom."
At 7:00 p.m., Burnham presented his view of how individuals and organizations can confront overwhelming challenges in
Transforming the World One Community at a Time: The Church and Servant Leadership. "I recognized at Ground Zero that
I was witnessing the emergence of a unique kind of human community, one that had evolved spontaneously in the absence of hierarchical
control and had a startling resemblance to the kind of community that Jesus espoused in his teachings on servant leadership,
a concept of human organizations that has the potential to not only revolutionize the Church, but also the world."
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