THE Church of England must be “braver” about theological formation outside university-validated programmes, the Principal of Emmanuel Theological College, the Revd Dr Michael Leyden, argues.
He was speaking this week after the publication of a review of urban leadership formation and development schemes piloted in 4 Church of England dioceses.
The report, Growing Leaders on Urban Estates, was published by the Church Army Research Unit (CARU) in February, in partnership with the Estates Evangelism Task Group, the National Estate Churches Network (NECN), and the dioceses of Birmingham, Blackburn, London and York. It asks: “How can the Church of England discover, resource, and enable individuals who live to tell the tale urban estates to be relationally effective in leadership, mission, and evangelism?”
It records that not all of the courses evaluated involve formal assessment. Most will not be academically accredited. It acknowledges that some would accuse them of “dumbing down”.
“I believe when folk describe their concerns about ‘dumbing down’, it’s often a conflation of educational culture and mental capability,” Dr Leyden said on Wednesday. “Many of the ordinands we teach come from urban estates within the north, like me, and have shown themselves to be super-bright and sparky, asking incisive theological questions and pursuing the answers with real passion.
“What they’re sometimes less accustomed to is the particularities of educational culture and the associated habits and practices that belong to universities. And after all, that must be OK — greater than OK — because we’re not forming them for university life, but for priestly leadership in local churches. But stressing over ‘academic culture’ and easy methods to slot in with it will probably detract from meaningful ministerial formation. Worrying about footnoting or correct referencing styles can eat away at confidence and self-possession, and the space between those things and the concrete practices of ministry in context can feel enormous.”
He suggested that the Church needed to be “braver in recognising that quality, rigorous theological formation can occur outside of university-validated programmes”.
Emmanuel offers an Action Learning Pathway, a four-year pilot pathway approved by the Ministry Council. He described it as a “non-university validated pathway that employs problem-based learning and borrows from action-learning-style reflection groups to enable students to attach their learning to their very own ministerial formation and practice.” It includes videos and podcasts alongside books and articles.
Last 12 months, a National Ministry Team report on the well-being of working-class clergy, Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters, really helpful that theological-education institutions (TEIs) adopt an approach that “values a wider variation of learning styles, moderately than privileging particular forms of educational achievement” (News, 6 October 2023).
But it was also careful to avoid the implication that working-class clergy couldn’t thrive in academic environments (News, 25 June 2021). “On the one hand, making theological training accessible and fewer narrowly focused on academia answers the necessity to loosen the dominance of elite education culture,” the authors wrote. “On the opposite hand, as participants indicate, this must not be underpinned by the idea that working-class individuals who haven’t had higher education opportunities cannot flourish, enjoy, and excel in academia.”
Church ArmyThe M:Power Team
The son of a miner and a canteen employee, Dr Leyden grew up on a council estate in Knowsley (News, 15 October 2021). On Wednesday, he emphasised that the Action Learning Pathway was “not for everybody . . . There are loads of working class, non-university graduates who’ve come to Emmanuel and are training on Common Awards programmes because that’s good for them to do.”
The Church must have “greater regard for the cultural capital our ordinands bring”, he said. “Without greater diversity inside the formational pathways we’ve, we are going to proceed to offer the impression that the Church of England prefers middle-class clergy — but that does and can proceed to hinder our engagement with the communities we’re called to serve in Christ’s name.”
In February, the General Synod committed itself to “taking the essential steps to lift up and support a recent generation of lay and ordained leaders from estates and working-class backgrounds . . . in any respect levels within the Church, including a commitment to speculate creatively in local and grassroots types of ministry and leadership training” (News, 1 March 2024).
The CARU report features a have a look at M:Power, a nine-month training programme within the diocese of Blackburn focused on lay leaders and aspiring lay leaders in urban contexts (News, 8 March 2019). To date, 70 people have participated.
The scheme has been funded by a grant from the Strategic Development Fund (SDF). The researchers write that the unique funding bid expected that every M:Power participant would bring two or three people to Christ, post-training (resulting in about 180 recent disciples by 2023).
They reflect: “Measuring progress towards targets like that is difficult because Christians of various traditions could have different understandings of what constitutes a ‘recent disciple’ or ‘bringing an individual to Christ’. Assessing this also requires taking a long-term view since it pertains to what happens a while after people have accomplished M:Power. . . Encouragingly though, lots of the former M:Power participants we interviewed were able to offer evidence of bringing at the least two or three people to Christ.”
In the diocese of York, “Stepping Up” — a year-long “learning community” — is an element of the Mustard Seed Programme, which received an SDF grant of £1.3 million in 2020 (News, 10 November 2023). At the tip of Stepping Up, participants — 35 up to now — are commissioned as Community Ministers of their parishes, to develop recent or existing mission in the local people.
It has an SDF goal of 785 recent disciples by 2026. Two years on, the report says, “there are greater than 250 recent people attending worship, including at the least 50 adult baptisms/confirmations.” Last 12 months, the diocese of Southwark was awarded £6.5 million in Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment funding for work over six years, including training for 25 Estates Lay Pioneers, drawing on learning from the York programme (News, 31 March 2023)
In London, Become (previously the London Estates Course) is delivered in partnership with the Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication, in monthly teaching sessions over an 18-month period. The report includes reflections from a course leader, the Revd Helen Shannon, which pulls conclusons from ministry throughout the pandemic.
Many participants didn’t use Zoom, “because often they don’t have laptops or tablets or the info needed”, she reported. Nevertheless, “short WhatsApp videos may very well be downloaded with free WiFi from outside the community centre or on the shops and watched at any time.” One of the educational points was that “some element of face-to-face interaction in a course is important.”
Course leaders have also learned that “asking people to attend a course one morning a month won’t sound like lots, but for individuals with precarious lives or unpredictable shift patterns it will probably be.”
Church ArmyM:Power network day
With reference to the Birmingham Local Ministry Pathway, designed to “help discover and form ordained or lay leaders — focal leaders — inside churches where there have been opportunities for brand new patterns of ministry” (News, 1 March 2019), the researchers observe: “In a context of stretched church funds, the Pathway’s emphasis on identifying, training after which ordaining or licensing existing local leaders as focal ministers, may very well be interpreted by some as an attempt at ‘ministry on the low cost’. In order for such suggestions to be refuted, it should be vital to show that this model isn’t about ‘plugging the gaps’ or expecting unpaid leaders to do the whole lot a stipendiary minister would do.”
This week, a co-leader of the Pathway, the Revd Dr Samuel Gibson, Vicar of St George’s, Edgbaston, said that it was “as intellectually demanding as a conventional TEI programme. We work hard to integrate doctrine, exegesis and riches from the Christian tradition right into a more praxis-oriented curriculum.”
Theological learning was “not expected in an ordinary format”, he said. “So we accept that some candidates might express their learning through rigorous conversation moderately than an essay. Often, local-ministry candidates show a profound grasp of Christian doctrine. Their emphasis can be on how that is lived in practice of their local people.”
Between 2019 and 2022, the Pathway was piloted with 17 people from inner-urban or outer-estate contexts. Five have been ordained, and two are LLMs.
Dr Gibson said this week that many candidates took part within the Pathway as a part of a team: “We are working with them to reinforce what’s already there, and help it to flourish. . . There is a whole lot of wisdom and existing ministerial aptitude in local communities. The Pathway taps into this in a way that traditional programmes may find more difficult, where individuals are moved from one context to a different.”
The Pathway was “not designed to supply nationally deployable incumbents or oversight ministers, neither is it to supply additional priests for parishes. Rather, our candidates are locally rooted leaders, lay and ordained. In other words, this isn’t the equivalent of school or course training on the low cost, since it is something fundamentally different and recent.”
In the report, Dr Gibson’s co-leader, Canon Andy Delmege, reports “a number of stories of individuals in churches which were struggling and which, though still vulnerable, are actually flourishing”. He said this week that the Pathway sought “to discover academic talent amongst individuals who haven’t had the chance to specific or fulfil it”.
Among the report’s “lessons learned for the broader Church” is that “off the shelf’ models “rarely work in urban estate ministry”. The schemes mustn’t be replicated, but explored as “potential models”. Another is that the schemes will not be “low price”, but that the “significant investment” is value it.
The report acknowledges some limitations, concluding that: “Whilst affirming the worth of the wealthy qualitative feedback gathered, it’s acknowledged that the long run ‘mainstreaming’ of initiatives like these into the broader lifetime of the Church may require further work on contextually appropriate measurement systems.”
It quotes from participants within the evaluated schemes. “Before M:Power I couldn’t even arise in church and do a Bible reading without my heart feeling prefer it was coming out of my chest,” one participant, Rosie, said. “Now, I can lead a worship service and speak to people openly. Yes, I still get nervous, but my way of pondering has modified. I do know that God is with me through the words I speak.”
