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Full Time

Full-time context based training at ERMC: a missional focus

By choosing our full-time context-based training route, you can combine part-time work in your local Primary Training Context (PTC) with your academic and formational work. As well as joining with part-time students in the residential programme and evening classes, you will be part of the vibrant learning community of full-time students who gather for study days in Cambridge under the guidance of the Director of Contextual Education / Tutor in Mission & Evangelism to focus on mission in both local and global contexts. Students training in a rich and diverse range of contexts across the Eastern Region for both lay and ordained ministry form the core of this context group, which is further enriched by full-time ERMC students based in the Diocese in Europe joining the study days online, and by Westcott House ordinands. Building on a solid grounding in contextual and mission theology, you will engage here with a creative combination of stimulating modules freshly designed to equip you to engage confidently with the most pressing and contemporary issues in the theology and practice of mission, to grow in competence, and to develop personally as a reflective missional practitioner. You will bring all your learning together through planning a missionally-focused guided project, brought to fruition in your PTC, which allows you innovatively to experiment with your ever-deepening skills in a safe and supervised environment.

Your PTC is normally your local parish, where you do most of your work, learning within a mutually enriching supervisory relationship alongside an experienced Training Minister for around 2.5 days each week plus Sundays. You will also have two full days for study, one of which is a Thursday when Cambridge study days happen, plus a further half day. In addition, you will do shorter church and social context placements to further broaden the contextual range of your deepening missional competence. In all of this, the precise balance of commitments is negotiated flexibly with your Training Minister and Core Staff Mentor, in consultation with the DoCE.

The programme is designed to allow full-time students to manage commitment to family whilst training in their local context. You will be part of the large ERMC community (c. 115 students, lay and ordained) and attend five residential weekends and a summer school. A wide range of academic pathways can be followed according to prior theological study, including DipHE, GradDip and MA. You can download a sample DipHE Course outline here.

Our full time programme is designed so that you can combine full time training with your family and other commitments. Training in your local context and placements can be arranged flexibly and teaching is scheduled at family friendly hours.

The academic side of the contextual modules studied by the Thursday context-group has given me a really useful toolbox of skills in mission and sociological research, which I go back to time and again. This group also provides a brilliant space for sharing mission-focused ideas and successes in our ministries. The practical focus fosters some deep creativity and hones leadership skills, and the friendships built, and the peer support given and received here, have continued beyond our time in training.

Alix Taylor, former ordinand