ERMC offers a two year full time contextual pathway. Students on this programme study the residential programme and evening classes together with our part time students. In addition they work part time within their local context meet for study days at one of our context hubs where they engage with local agencies, such as prison, hospital, local care home, local retreat centre, undertakers, hospice and schools, and reflect on that experience together. This enables us to gather the expertise and professional understanding of those working in local settings, it allows us to make good connections with the context and with people locally and enables us to model how to make connections with local agencies to enrich contextual ministry and mission. As part of training and well before ordination, students relate to their local context and diocese in an enriching and productive way. Click here to download a sampe course outline.
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.
Our context group is a mixed cohort that includes people training for lay ministry, priestly ministry, permanent diaconate ministry, recently licensed lay ministers, recently ordained curates and experienced ministers. Students learn alongside their training minister and with the support of a mentor. Learning between experienced and training ministers is mutually enriching, with some innovative and rich work going on through co-created projects conducted by student and training minister in parish settings. A full-time student is expected to work in the parish setting for approximately 2.5 days and Sunday, their study will constitute 2.5 days. There is flexibility to negotiate the exact commitments to parish with the local supervisor.
I found the specially adapted contextual training programme met my needs really well. It was designed in such a way that I could make sense of it and apply it to my ministry in the wider world. The course tutors are very knowledgeable and supportive, applying an easy and sensitive approach in their tutoring and thereby enabling students to grow and develop into their ministry built on a good, sound, basis of understanding.
Lynda Sebbage, former student
Full-time students can manage the commitments of families and training in their local context and part-time students get the benefits of contextual learning. All students will be part of the large ERMC community (115 students, lay and ordained) and will attend six residential weekends and a summer school.
We believe that contextual learning enables our students to inhabit the virtues of Anglican ecclesial practice, to speak with conviction about a loving God, to evangelise with respect and to take seriously the call to love our neighbours in difference. These values connect our students with the wider world and give witness to an incarnational God that cares about humanity and the world we live in. Learning in context is implicitly formational, invoking and experiencing a living God.