AOCM

New Developments in Ministerial Training

Dr David Way is Theological Education Secretary to the Ministry Division of the Archbishops’ Council

Ordinands will be well aware of the fast changing training scene of which they are a crucial part. You yourselves are often faced with interesting choices in training, whether that is in terms of full or part-time pathways, modules to be taken or placement opportunities. At a national level, the ministerial training scene today is marked by a great number of questions about the future. The main drivers for these are:

• the desire to develop better lifelong patterns of learning and formation;
• the need to develop greater flexibility in pathways for candidates, for example taking in full-time and part-time types of training;
• the requirement to make better use of limited financial resources.

This short article seeks to set out some of the main issues which we face as a church today. In all this change, we need to keep our eye on how the candidates of the present and the future can best be equipped to serve in dynamic and faithful ways in order to further the mission of the church.

Training for Pioneer Ministry

There has been a great deal of discussion stemming from a report made to General Synod, Mission Shaped Church. This picked up a range of issues including church planting, new ways of being Church and, of course, new ways of training candidates for pioneer ministry. The General Synod, in giving a warm welcome to that report, specifically asked the Ministry Division to take up the training issues and to bring forward new, context-based types of training for pioneer ministers. Since then we have been working in a number of ways. Firstly, we were given an additional sum of £100,000 to give to training institutions to enable curriculum development work to be undertaken. Needless to say it was extremely difficult to decide which were the best bids for this money but in the end the money was given to St John’s, Nottingham (to develop their existing mixed-mode training course), the Yorkshire RTP [Regional Training Partnership] (to draw on the resources of Wilson Carlile College for Evangelists, Sheffield, the Northern Ordination Course and the College of the Resurrection), Ripon College, Cuddesdon (in order to do some important empirical research in this area), the South East Institute for Theological Education (so that experience can be gained from a part-time mode of training) and Ridley Hall and Westcott House, working together in this area. In due course this work should feed through into the curriculum, both for those sponsored for the particular focus of pioneer ministry but also for ordinands more generally.

Secondly the Ministry Division has been working with Ridley Hall and two large London churches with theological resources (Holy Trinity, Brompton and St Mary’s, Bryanston Square). This partnership is working on new contextual programmes for ordained pioneer ministers. The form of the training will include continuing paid lay ministry in a local church or network church, one day a week for theological study and reflection at one of the London centres and five one-week blocks of residential training a year at Ridley Hall. The plan is for candidates to take a standard educational pathway for ordinands, already agreed for the Cambridge Federation. Negotiations are going on for candidates to take the Anglia Ruskin University’s Diploma/Degree in Theology and Ministry. This new scheme will be carefully evaluated from the first so that we can get substantial feedback on it, which can then be fed into the wider training network. This is an exciting venture and may have ramifications for the training seen in the future.

Hind Implementation

The first new training opportunities are now coming on line. These include pathways for a full range of learners, ordinands (whether for a deployable ministry or an OLM [Ordained Local Ministry] type ministry), Readers and lay learners. This is precisely the type of common pattern of learning which the Hind report had in mind. The Anglia Ruskin University degree, mentioned above, is an example of this. It was developed by the Cambridge Federation in co-operation with the dioceses in order to serve the needs of Cambridge-based and regionally-based students. Thus, it will be possible to take this award whether you are a residential student in Cambridge, on the Eastern Region Ministry Course, or training for OLM in one of the two dioceses in the region which has a scheme. In addition you can also do it as a Reader or a lay learner. Another leading example is the new part-time course being developed by the Southern North West RTP which will take its first students in September 2007. This is an entirely new programme for ordinands, Readers/Preachers and lay learners. It has been developed by the RTP which itself has Church of England, Methodist, United Reformed Church and Baptist membership and will be used by all their students. The programme is a Foundation degree with a high level of integration between ministerial practice, reflection on it and theological learning. The degree has been developed with the Universities of Chester and Liverpool Hope. When this programme has been finalised, the region will turn to the question of what sort of IME4-7 (i.e. the continuing learning in the first four years of ministry) should follow the new course. Again, this is a very exciting development, as envisaged by the Hind report.

Finally in this area, it is perhaps worth commenting that inevitably many regional discussions are concentrating at the moment mainly on organisational issues and on pre-ordination training. However, we are encouraging colleagues to look at IME1-7 as a whole (i.e. the pre-ordination and the post-ordination phases) and to work in plans for Reader training and Education for Discipleship (accredited lay learning). It will be vital to keep in mind this broad set of objectives so that we make a contribution to the equipping of all God’s people.

Questions about local ministry

Alongside these developments, there has been a continuing debate about the development of local ministry and specifically ordained OLM. This form of training and ministry has been developed in just under half of the dioceses of the Church of England. In some of those it has become an intrinsic part of dioceses’ strategy for ministry. At the same time, some dioceses have decided that they want to re-focus their efforts in this area, for example promoting local lay ministry, while others have taken the opportunity of the new selection category to re-think the whole issue of OLM. The new category for selection focuses primarily on the broad question about exercising ordained ministry. At a second level it allows the diocese to sponsor somebody with a particular focus of ministry. This could be nationally deployable ministry, ministry in secular employment, pioneer ministry or indeed OLM. Some dioceses are taking the opportunity to develop OLM by understanding ‘local’ in much broader terms, for example across a deanery. At the same time the developing scene of regional training partnerships means that OLM training schemes do not need to stand on their own but can become part of a wider enterprise. Thus, some dioceses are looking to develop a local ministry pathway through an RTP or local college/course. Much work remains to be done in this area but there are lots of opportunities for new thinking. One of the hopes for it is that OLM candidates will have access to a much wider range of learning opportunities, for example, drawing on the resources of current colleges and courses.

In all this work, the Ministry Division continues to work closely with the full range of interested parties - bishops, DDOs, trainers, ordinands. While we live in a time of change, it is equally important for us to ensure that the candidates who are training at the moment received the best possible training. This will now of course include expectations about continuing learning in the early years of ministry and beyond. The Ministry Division continues to welcome its partnership with AOCM in seeking to take forward these goals.