Planting Churches Amongst Secular Anglicans

Reading the comments following Andrew Jones’s compelling account of his 20 years in ministry, someone mentioned they were studying by distance with Gordon-Conwell Seminary. These days any link to quality distance education catches my eye so I went exploring. Interestingly, the seminary is partnering with BILD to deliver a distance and cohort based DMin in Global Church-Based Theological Education. The programme looks great and the cohort based model (which I advocated loudly for at my old theological college in the late 90s) is ideally suited to practical theological education.

Surfing around the other programmes, I stumbled on the DMin in Missions & Cross-Cultural Studies, where I was captivated by this field study,

“Planting churches among secular members of an established church setting, e.g. Orthodox in Greece, Anglicans in England”

Wow. All that needs is to smuggle the word ‘urban’ in there somwhere to sum up my missiological thinking whilst in London. Good to see some theological educators are making the practical link between the problems of church planting, secularity and establishment. Maybe, this will be helped by more examples of the kind of practical forward thinking that Jonny Baker has shared with us.