General Introduction
The purpose of the Bishop’s Certificate and Diploma in Theology for Ministry programmes is to help you to learn about and reflect upon key areas of Christian belief and practice and their relationship to contemporary mission and ministry, in order for you to further develop your God-given gifts and skills for the service of God.
To facilitate this process we need to explore and analyse the context in which mission and ministry are located. This means that in addition to learning how to develop further the ways that we think theologically (which we hope will be nurtured by the courses in the programme) and in addition to the opportunities for us to develop our skills for ministry, we also need to develop tools of analysis to help us to understand the features and dynamics of the world in which we live.
We might like to think of this as the twin processes of deep listening and double listening.
Deep listening is an intentional way of being. We want to know more than just the facts and figures, or what appears to be happening on the surface. We are concerned, instead, to engage deeply in a situation, putting our own pre-conceptions to one side as we seek to find out through listening to the experiences of others the reality of the situation.
Double listening is the process through which we then seek to find meaning in the reality which we have uncovered. We listen on the one hand to the experiences of those around us, and on the other to the experiences of our Christian tradition.
Another way of looking at this is that we are being asked to listen carefully to the word (that is, the printed word and God’s Word), and to listen attentively to the world (the experiences of our wider communities).
This is not a one way process of applying our theology to our situation, because our experience of the world may (as it has done throughout Christian history) inform, change and develop our theology as well.
So the challenge for us is to listen deeply to both the experiences of our wider communities, and the breadth of the Christian tradition as well, as we seek to uncover what is going on around us.
The focus for this intentional conversation will be the situation analysis handbooks which we will be using throughout the programme.
These handbooks invite us to look closely and carefully at a number of different areas in order to build up a database of information about ourselves and the world in which we live.
The process of Situation Analysis for Mission and Ministry is sometimes seen as a series of circles in which we begin with an exploration of ourselves and then move outwards to explore facets of the world we inhabit.
In the Certificate programme we focus our situation analysis research on the first three audits: Personal, Work and Vocation, Community and Church. In the Diploma programme we focus on a further three audits: Global, Spirituality and Reflective Practice.
You will notice that this is not called ‘situation description’ it is ‘situation analysis’.
The difference between description and analysis is important. Whereas ‘description’ implies that we become absorbed in what we describe in its own terms, ‘analysis’ requires that we:
- stand back from the area of study;
- use various categories of analysis which we have consciously chosen in order to try to understand more about the area of study;
- develop precise use of the various “vocabularies” and “structures” which are distinctive to the chosen categories of analysis.
We intend to move beyond a description of what appears to be happening on the surface, to an analysis which asks why things are as they are.
We anticipate that once we have developed tools of analysis appropriate to our situations, we will continue to use them to reflect critically upon our ministries in the future. This may mean that as we look back over our situation analysis data during the programme we will want to update it and revise it as we discover new realities and new insights.
We may be tempted to think that our situation analysis work is an optional extra in the programme: this is not the case. Our integration of this situation analysis data with the rest of our learning is of paramount importance in our journey of discovering how we may better connect with the mission which God is already engaged in around us.
Sessions will be provided at the learning weekends to help us in this task.
