this is the seventh of a series of short reflections celebrating twenty years at cms
see 1. gold | 2. emerging church | 3. blah | 4. new forms | 5. worship tricks | 6. mission shaped church and fresh expressions
one of the recommendations in mission shaped church was that the church recognise that the kind of person starting these fresh expressions of church had a bit of a different skill set, way of looking and being in the world, a different gift. the report used two descriptions for this - pioneer ministry and missional entrepreneurship. quite quickly the church of england created a new designation for ministry whereby you could be recognised and ordained as a pioneer. this was pretty encouraging and surprising. at this point at cms we were already involved with others in some training called resource - i still have very fond memories of that. the model was that over a series of weekends we would visit somewhere creative mission was taking place and learn from it tied in with a series of teaching themes. we folded that into what we went on to develop.
[our first prospectus which we produced in 2011 - we didn't have one before we started!]
when pioneer ministry was recognised as a thing, theological colleges were invited to design training. i don't quite know what they designed but the imagination was not quite what it could have been. i remember being in a few meetings where it was discussed and being labelled 'priest plus' - in other words you learned all the regular stuff and then did a slightly different placement or an extra thing on a wednesday afternoon or something.
one of the other recommendations in the report mission shaped church was that training for pioneers should include or be done through the lens of cross cultural mission (see quote to right). and after a couple of years the then head of ministry approached cms to ask if we could design some training because in his view what was being done was frustrating pioneers and wasn't really fit for purpose, and i think he thought that we would have experience on the cross cultural imagination and practice - which was true. essentially cms then asked me if i would work out how we would do that, design it and find a college to work with on it or a way we could do it. to cut a long story short i did and that request took over my life for the next decade really. of course in classic church of england fashion although they asked us, it was quite quickly obvious that was not approved of by various other people and it took a further three years to actually get permission to train ordinands. but we got dreaming, drew up a roadmap of what we wanted to do in december 2009 and i was tasked with getting the first cohort in sept 2010. somehow we pulled that out of the bag - looking back i have no idea how. we started with training independent students, lay training if you like and then two years later added in training ordinands alongside them. our first prospectus cover is above and is a road going into the fog - that felt pretty apt.
i realised i was at a change point and wrote a blog post and accompanying newsletter here reflecting on changes over the first 8 years at cms and then a post looking forward to the next 8 or whatever it was to become. that was year before we actually launched and i enjoyed reading this in it:
i can promise that the training we do will be totally geared to pioneering in mission with creativity and imagination and will be shaped with and by pioneers rather than pioneering as an add on to existing training for being a parish priest
i think we delivered on that promise! since then we have gradually added in various things so that now at cms we train at undergraduate, post graduate and doctoral research level with around 90 students at anyone time and also unaccredited training round the country (more on that later). yes we do train ordinands but the vast majority are independent students paying their own way. in many ways the whole emerging church movement has largely been a lay led movement. many of those who did get ordained did so having already pioneered so that they could share communion with the community they had helped start.
i'll say a bit more about this pioneer gift and about training in others posts.
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