The Church is currently experiencing a transition in the way it understands and practises both mission and ministry. It is to be outward-looking, engaging with the wider community, involving all its members in mission and clergy are to play the role of enablers and equippers of the ministry of the whole church. However, ministerial formation in colleges and courses throughout the country lags behind this emerging consensus. ‘Theological education’ is still largely based on academic models. Reimagining Ministerial Formation offers a new way forward, where ‘ministry’ comes to be about the whole church, and ministerial formation is about collaboration between clergy and laity. It argues strongly for a shift away from ‘front-loaded’ training, to a new focus on formation as a life-long process.

This book is an arresting interdisciplinary publication on Christian education, comprising works by leading scholars, professionals and practitioners from around the globe. It focuses on the integrated approaches to Christian education that are both theoretically sound and practically beneficial, and identifies innovative pedagogical methods and tools that have been field-tested and practice-approved. It discusses topics such as exploring programmes and courses through different lenses; learning challenges and opportunities within organisational management; theology of business; Christian models of teaching in different contexts; job preparedness; developing different interpretive or meaning-making frameworks for working with social justice, people with disability, non-profit community organisations and in developing country contexts. It offers graduate students, teachers, school administrators, organisational leaders, theologians, researchers and education practitioners a fresh and inspiring reimagining of Christian education perspectives and practices and the ramifications of their application to life-long learning.

This text is a comprehensive introduction to mission and ministry in the contemporary Church which enables students to prepare for ministry in a changing church within a changing world.

Drawing on insights from the training practices of the English medieval craft guilds, a global survey of 500 church planters, interviews with artists and church planting trainers and the authors 30 years of ministry experience, 'The Craft of Church Planting' offers a distinctive and imaginative perspective on the methods used to train future practitioners in the art of church planting. Demonstrating how training for the next generation of church planting leaders might be informed by the historic master-apprentice model, guild learning communities, creativity and an artisan approach to ministry, this book is a vital resource to inform the methods of training for the next generation of church planters.

Beginning with a ‘Street Nativity Play’ that didn’t end as planned, and finishing with an open-ended conversation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, "Being Interrupted" locates an institutionally-anxious Church of England within the wider contexts of divisions of race and class in ‘the ruins of empire’, alongside ongoing gender inequalities, the marginalization of children, and catastrophic ecological breakdown. In the midst of this bleak picture, Al Barrett and Ruth Harley open a door to a creative disruption of the status quo, ‘from the outside, in’: the in-breaking of the wild reality of the ‘Kin-dom’ of God. Through careful and unsettling readings in Mark’s gospel, alongside stories from a multicultural outer estate in east Birmingham, they paint a vivid picture of an 'alternative economy' for the Church's life and mission, which begins with transformative encounters with neighbours and strangers at the edges of our churches, our neighbourhoods and our imaginations, and offers new possibilities for repentance and resurrection.

For generations most churchgoers have been encouraged to see the responsibility for the life and mission of the church in the hands of the trained clergy. A church embracing God’s call to mission requires these same worshipers to see themselves as ‘missionary disciples’ with a vital part to play in the church’s ministry. How is a change of this magnitude to be accomplished? Drawing on the discipline of adult education and his own research into the way people learn, David Heywood explains how churches can become learning communities in which people grow as disciples and find their place in a collaborative pattern of ministry. He challenges the prevailing approach to ministerial training as overly theoretical and individualistic, and points towards a model of training based around shared reflection on practice.

Ordained Anglican ministry is changing rapidly. Soon the majority of clergy are likely to be volunteers and, especially in rural areas, female. All mainstream Churches recognise that new contexts need new forms of ministry. Ordained Local Ministers (OLMs) are priests specifically called out by their local congregation and ordained to minister in that locality. Half the dioceses in England and elsewhere in the Anglican Communion including Australasia, Scotland and North America have established formal schemes to enable this type of ministry. Some dioceses believe the process has helped to revitalise parishes and raise the spiritual temperature of congregations. Others have called a halt, believing their schemes have somehow gone wrong or have not 'delivered'. The time has come for a calm assessment of available evidence about an experiment into which the Church has poured considerable time, effort and money over the last twenty years. Does it have ongoing value, or is it just one more bright idea that has flourished for a season and has now had its day?

Worship is a dynamic, living encounter that should never be static. In the Church of England, although Common Worship provides texts for every season and occasion, the church constantly needs to refresh its worship, just as it reshapes its presence in local communities. In this comprehensive volume, a wide range of experienced liturgists, musicians and pastoral practitioners consider the principles that will determine the character and quality, as well as the content, of our worship in the future. The contributors are all members of the Group for the Renewal of Worship, a broadly evangelical group within the Church of England and including senior clergy, musicians, theological college tutors in liturgy and former members of the Liturgical Commission.

The impact that John V. Taylor had on our contemporary understanding of mission is vast – his determination that mission should mean engagement across cultural boundaries has deep resonance today. In 'Imagining Mission with John V. Taylor', leading missional thinkers Jonny Baker and Cathy Ross invite us into a vision of church, mission and society which takes John Taylor’s ideas seriously, seeking to imagine what Taylor’s insights might mean for these three areas in our contemporary context. The result is a clarion call to the church to take bigger risks and dream bigger dreams.

Being Church offers ideas and strategies, based on real experience and detailed reflection, on processes that offer support and challenge to church leaders and especially clergy, whether parish clergy, or diocesan advisers, or bishops.