Northern Baptist College

 

A Learning Community

 
Baptist Colleges don’t just train church leaders for the future.  Together with our students and the churches they serve, we are actively engaged right now helping local Christian communities across the country to proclaim Christ and to work for the coming of his Kingdom.  Many of the churches where students are on placement are only able to have a minister in training because of the generous giving of fellow Baptists through Home Mission.

It’s now over thirty years since Northern Baptist College (NBC) pioneered what was then known as the Alternative Pattern of Training.  Instead of students having to go and live in a college building for three or four years while they did their training, the men and women whom God was calling into pastoral ministry learned on the job, leading local churches for three days a week and studying for a degree in theology for three days a week.  

It is a demanding pattern of ministerial formation but one that ensures that learning about the ways of God remains rooted in the day-to-day realities of leading God’s people in mission.

This is now the standard pattern of ministerial formation used by all the British Baptist Colleges.  It is also a pattern of training that has enabled many a local congregation to find the leadership it needed to help it make significant progress in working with their communities.  It is not at all unusual for the leadership of a minister in training under the guidance of a Baptist college to help a church reach the point where it can call a full-time minister to serve them in the next phase of their life and growth.


The current batch of NBC ministerial students working with churches supported by Home Mission includes Alan Brand at Thornaby on Teesside.  Alan is pictured celebrating a recent Baptism.  Ian Ley and his family minister with Newall Green Baptist Church on the Wythenshawe estate in South Manchester.  David Callander, at Trinity Church in Radcliffe, North Manchester headed up the town’s Churches Together children’s holiday club this Summer.

Please pray:

• For Alan, Ian, David and other ministers in training across the length and breadth of the country working with churches supported Home Mission.
• Please pray that more and more churches will be helped by ministers in training to grow into God’s future.
• Please pray for NBC and our other Baptist Colleges as they support, guide, teach and encourage students engaged in all manner of creative mission in all manner of communities.

Click here for a printable Fact File about Northern Baptist College to share with your church.

Click here to read more stories about how the money you give to Home Mission is being used to bring the love of God to communities around the country.