The College of the Resurrection and St Hild College are pleased to announce a new Residential, and Contextual, Training Pathway to be offered in partnership between the two colleges from September 2023.
We are collaborating to offer our distinctive strengths in a single training package. Mirfield will contribute its residential setting, formational community, patterns of prayer and common life whilst St Hild brings its experience of contextual training, expertise in church planting/revitalisation and that breadth and variety of Anglican tradition associated with regional TEIs.
Ordinands will be registered at Mirfield, which will take overall responsibility for their formation, but their contextual training and much of their academic work, usually leading to a University of Durham Common Awards qualification, will be overseen by St Hild.
As ordinands prepare for ministry in different contexts and in increasingly varied churches, they will learn to navigate and to participate in the different cultures of both colleges. They will be encouraged to develop a spirituality and to grow roots that enable them to flourish, and to lead not only in the catholic tradition of Mirfield, but amid the wider spectrum of traditions represented by St Hild College.
This pathway should be suitable for a variety of ordinands:
- Those who seek the benefits of a contextual training mode but who seek to acquire the discipline in personal and corporate prayer best provided in residential community.
- Those who seek residential training in a tradition represented by St Hild and who will benefit from the structured spiritual life of Mirfield.
- Those still exploring the Church of England’s spectrum of theology, spirituality and worship, and perhaps still prayerfully seeking their home.
- Those keen to have roots and experience in more than one understanding and expression of church life.
- Those interested in training in a college that exemplifies key characteristics of a “new monastic community.”
Our two colleges hope that ordination candidates will consider the benefits of this new pathway and of training in a province that produced passionate missionaries formed by the disciplines of monastic prayer.