Agenda Volume 3 - Methodist Conference

57. The Fruitful Field Project
balancing the need to give clarity
and direction to formation and
training in the Church of England
with the need to create and preserve
space for growing ecumenical
participation in the new awards at
both national and local level, as
seems most appropriate to our
partners.” 23 As well as inviting the
Methodist Church’s involvement,
the Church of England is also
working with the United Reformed
Church and colleges aligned with
the Baptist Union of Great Britain.
The Committee is grateful to the
Church of England for its willingness
to work in this ecumenical manner,
and the Committee has sought to
accompany and feed into the Church
of England’s processes at every
stage. Over recent months, this has
become a more formal partnership,
with full Methodist representation on
the working party which is developing
the detail of the suite of awards and
Methodist staff support incorporated
into the processes for identifying a
university partner. It is expected that
the university partner will be identified
in late May or early June 2012.
154 The Committee is committed to
the development of pathways,
opportunities, programmes and
resources alongside and in
partnership with ecumenical partners
wherever possible, and sees this
as a central value of the Network
(see paragraph 127.5 above). The
Committee consequently anticipates
that the university partner identified
through the processes discussed
above will be a university which
could also, within an ecumenically
negotiated validating partnership
with the university, serve a significant
portion of the validating needs of the
Network. It would, in many ways, be
a backward step if Methodist student
ministers and Anglican ordinands
were not to be able to follow
pathways within the same suite of
awards. There are also many positive,
developmental aspects to Methodist
participation. Not least among these
is that participation within the same
Higher Education partnership as the
Church of England (and, potentially,
the United Reformed Church and the
Baptist Union of Great Britain) will
make ecumenical collaboration in
the development of future pathways
and resources much easier – both
for ordained ministry, and also for
a wider range of ministries and for
discipleship development more
generally. The Committee is therefore
very pleased that it seems likely, at
the time of writing, that it will be able
to recommend that the Network enter
into the partnership which emerges
from the current processes. The
Priorities of the Methodist Church
commit us to working “in partnership
with others wherever possible,” and
the Network’s participation within
an ecumenical Higher Education
partnership is a good instance
of strong and mutually-beneficial
partnership working.
23
“Formation for Ministry: Phase 2 Report”, 45
Conference Agenda 2012 705