~ What goes on at

Northern Baptist College

these days? ~

It’s autumn, so college tutors are on the road. Middlesbrough or Coventry one Sunday, Wallasey or Leicester another. For ministerial students have a dual life, in College two days a week, and dividing the rest of the week between the demands of a church placement, study and family responsibilities. And NBC’s four full time tutors are the bridge between the two. At the beginning and end of each year, we visit them in their placements and meet with the local support group who are our partners as they "learn on the job".

The norm is for students to spend 4 years in sole charge of a small church, enabling a congregation, sometimes with the help of a Home Mission grant, to have a ministry they could not otherwise afford. In that role, the student experiences many dimensions of ministry, the challenges and the excitement. Increasingly though, as “doing church” is changing for the 21st century, we are creating other more flexible patterns of training. So a student may, for example, work in a large church alongside an experienced minister, or continue part-time with a day-job in a relevant field alongside their ministerial role; and for the future we hope to place someone in a mission project on the margins of church and society.

We need to equip students not to go blindly with the latest evangelistic or spiritual fad, but to bring new thinking into dialogue with informedtheology through the process of accompanied learning in College. Much of ministry will still involve routine tasks but ministers are called upon to exercise imagination as they engage with a society increasingly spiritually awakened but minimally churched. We want to train them to be “reflective practitioners”.

So how do we do that down the road at Luther King House? The majority of students enjoy (well, we like to think they do!) two intense days studying for a BA in Contextual Theology which we popularly call the “Faith in Living” course. We’ve become so accustomed to this name that it’s easy to forget that it denotes a university programme deliberately designed to integrate academic learning in areas appropriate to ministry (theology, pastoral studies, ethics, bible, missiology etc) with their experience past and present as disciples of Jesus wherever that takes them. So sitting with a victim of an attempted murder on a life support machine may become a resource for a reflection on euthanasia, or an assignment on the theology of sin and evil, or a discussion of pastoral practice, or an analysis of social deprivation in the area it happened, or an angry tirade against God for allowing innocent people to suffer.

But there’s more to College than writing assignments. We live and work as an ecumenical community, five colleges in Partnership, and we express that most dynamically in worshipping together, principally at Eucharist on a Tuesday. Then because each denomination has different ways of doing it, we meet in College groups to focus on aspects of ministerial formation, covering areas such as preaching, mission, personal spirituality, legal and fiscal regulations governing church life – there’s a long list. Through all this we build close relationships, within the peer group and between staff and students. Weekly tutorials are the backbone of the staff/student relationship; most students find college stretching and testing, of themselves and of their faith, and staff journey with them excited over what we see God doing in them, and challenging and comforting as we perceive they need it.

There are pains as well. As I write this, we are mourning the death of Gillian, one of last year’s leavers, only recently diagnosed as terminally ill. We are all left with so many unanswered questions.

NBC’s work is no longer confined to ministerial training nor to Manchester. For 10 years now we have been developing regional learning across the five Associations of the north, offering people in churches a variety of resources to deepen their knowledge and enrich their path of discipleship. Members of Union Chapel have participated in some of our courses. I have a particular responsibility in that area – but that's another story. Alan asked me to write about ministerial training, but it’s hard to divorce the two manifestations of NBC. More women and men are hearing a call to ministry of various kinds through the work of our Regional Tutors, so the different pathways have connecting lanes.

During the summer, and as a result of his visit in January, I attended Mark Janes’ church in Plaistow. Mark is now on sabbatical and is in part reflecting on how his training equipped him for his very different pastorates. Seeing him ministering to his own people in situations he could never have imagined in Manchester (my visit coincided with the euphoria over the successful Olympic bid followed swiftly by the horror of the London bombings) I am reminded that we can’t prepare students for every eventuality. But what we can do is to equip those called to pastoral ministry with the skills they need to read the “signs of the times”, interpret what God may be doing in their place in their time, and through worship and service to empower the community of God’s people to live and strive for justice and shalom for all people which is the only good news worth sharing.

                                                                                 Anne Phillips