Full-time context based training at ERMC: A missional focus
By choosing our full-time context-based route, you will train on a stimulating pathway which generates an engaging and mutually informing conversation between your academic and formational work and your ministerial training in the local Primary Training Context (PTC). You will join a vibrant, creative, and growing learning community of full-time students rooted in a rich and diverse range of contexts across the Eastern Region and the Diocese in Europe who form the core of our Mission in Practice group. Under the guidance of the Director of Contextual Education / Tutor in Mission & Evangelism you will study modules together which focus on mission in both local and global contexts. Underpinned by a solid grounding in a range of contemporary mission theologies and contextual intercultural theologies, this learning will equip you to engage confidently and critically with some of the most pressing and contemporary issues in the theology and practice of mission. Under experienced supervision, you will bring to fruition your growing competence and personal development as a reflective missional practitioner by planning and delivering a missionally-focused guided project in your PTC, creatively experimenting with your ever-deepening skills.
Your PTC is normally your local parish or, in Europe, chaplaincy, where you do most of your work, learning within a mutually enriching supervisory relationship alongside an experienced Training Minister for around 16-20 hours each week in total, including Sundays. You will also have two full days for study, one of which is a Thursday when Mission in Practice group study days happen in Cambridge for UK-based students/ online for Europe-based students, plus a further half day. Thursday teaching is scheduled at family friendly hours. Shorter church and social context placements complement your principal work in the PTC, and serve to broaden the contextual range of your missional competence. In all of this, the precise balance and rhythm of commitments is negotiated flexibly with your Training Minister and DoCE/ Core Staff Mentor, to ensure that your programme is sustainable. It is designed to allow you to honour commitments to family whilst engaging in full-time training in your local context.
You will be part of the large ERMC community (around 115 students) attending five residential weekends and a summer school, and joining with part-time students training for lay and ordained ministry in the residential programme and evening classes. A wide range of academic pathways can be/ have been followed according to prior theological study, including DipHE, GradDip, MA and even PhD. You can download a sample DipHE Course outline here. Reflecting this rich academic, geographical, and cultural diversity, our present cohort is a warm, welcoming, supportive, stimulating and stretching learning community, and they look forward to meeting you in the last Mission in Practice session of the year, towards the end of May, to which you are warmly invited.
“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 student