Archbishop Desmond Tutu, actor Sam Waterston and more than 300 guests joined the Very Rev. Ward B. Ewing, dean of the General Theological Seminary, on Sept. 9 for the official opening of the seminary’s $27 million conference center.

Archbishop Tutu, for whom the conference center is named, is a Nobel laureate and the retired Archbishop of Cape Town (South Africa). He officiated at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Mr. Waterston, an Episcopalian and star of the popular NBC-TV crime drama “Law and Order,” was the honorary chair of the capital campaign.

“The center will nurture those who will be agents of peace and reconciliation,” Archbishop Tutu said in brief remarks prior to the ribbon cutting. “The world is desperately hungry to be filled with the goodness of God.”

The 60,000 square-foot conference center is an adaptive reuse of three of the seminary’s buildings on its historic New York City campus. The remodeled areas include two large conference rooms capable of accommodating up to 350 people, five smaller meeting rooms, and 60 overnight guest rooms.

The facility will be available for use by the seminary as well as outside church groups, educators and non-profit institutions. The mission of the center is to serve as “a place where the world and the academy meet, that both may be strengthened and transformed by the Spirit.” The inaugural conference, titled “Reconciliation at the Roundtable: God’s Call in the 21st Century,” began the following day. Workshops will examine local situations calling for reconciliation, how healing has occurred in those settings, and how it can be applied elsewhere. The three-day conference concludes Wednesday morning with a plenary address by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Construction on the project began in May 2005. While the majority of the work is complete, construction has recently begun on the center’s geothermic heating and cooling system.

The seminary is also scheduled to embark soon on an even more ambitious construction project involving demolition of Sherrill Hall. The replacement structure will house the seminary’s library as well as income-producing residential space. Revenue generated from the Ninth Avenue project will pay for the construction of an administration building on 20th Street, but will not generate any income for the $21 million plan to preserve the rest of the buildings.

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