Agenda Volume 3 - Methodist Conference

57. The Fruitful Field Project
don, was training female teachers.
Also a partnership in Birmingham was
allowing some Methodist missionaries
to be trained at Kingsmead College;
Guy Chester’s first gift of land in
Muswell Hill in London is only a few
years away; and Hilda Porter’s vision
of a Methodist International House in
London is surely in gestation.
79 The late 1960s and early 1970s were
years of significant change for institutions
forming student ministers. The
1967 Conference closed Headingley
College, merging its activities with
those of Didsbury College, already
relocated from Manchester to Bristol.
The 1971 Conference approved a
merger of Handsworth College and
the Queen’s College (an Anglican
theological college), to establish what
is now known as the Queen’s
Foundation for Ecumenical Theological
Education. Finally, the 1972
Conference elected to close Hartley
Victoria College.
80 Though the site of Hartley Victoria
was sold, the College itself
maintained an existence through a
pioneering relationship with the Free
Churches in Manchester. Luther King
House Educational Trust, of which
Hartley Victoria College now forms
a part, was the first in a series of
ecumenical ventures in which the
Methodist Church participated, which
saw new forms of education for
student ministers – pathways which
largely did not rely on residence in a
college community. This development
led to a proliferation in the number
of institutions sponsored by the
Methodist Church for the delivery of
pathways for student ministers. In
1955, six colleges educated student
ministers. By 2005, 20 institutions
were being used by the Church to
educate student ministers – 2 of
them recently established by the
Methodist Church itself, in the form
of the Wesley Study Centre in Durham
and the York Institute for Community
Theology.
81 Major decisions about our learning
institutions were made by the 2007
Conference (the 2006 Conference
having rejected proposals brought for
its consideration). The decision of the
2007 Conference located full-time,
bursaried student ministers at three
institutions (the 2006 Conference
having been asked to locate such
pathways at only two institutions).
The most recent decision of the Conference
in this context was the decision
of the 2010 Conference to close
Wesley College, Bristol.
82 Today’s distribution of Methodistsponsored
institutions, colleges and
centres is as follows:
Institutions receiving student
ministers following full-time pathways
82.1 The Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham:
The Queen’s Foundation receives
student ministers from the Methodist
Church and ordinands from the
Church of England, the latter as
full-time students and, in higher
numbers, as part-time students from
668 Conference Agenda 2012