MA Mission Prize launched 

Are you an MA student at a theological college in the UK working on research around the themes of mission, evangelism and church planting? 

Have you recently graduated with an MA thesis is this field?

Is your theological college connected to one of the 50 national Member Churches of Churches Together in England?

Churches Together in England (CTE), alongside the Mission Research Network, is looking for high quality, recently passed MA theses to add to a small but growing repository of MAs and PhDs which will be made available on our website. Students can submit their work directly to CTE, or Theological Educational Institutions can propose the work of some of their best MA candidates.  As a guideline, to be considered for the prize the submission will normally have received a mark of high 60s into the 70s.

The prize consists of a £100 cash gift and an opportunity for the MA to appear in an edited format (6,000 words) in the recently launched journal Ecclesial Futures, published by Wipf and Stock.
 
We are looking for MA work that potentially falls into the categories below, following the Ecclesial Futures outlines (with any empirical work focusing on the UK context):

• Longitudinal studies in congregational development over three or more years.
• Diagnoses of why different churches flourish or die. 
• Ethnographic studies of the cultural changes required in ‘flourishing’ churches.
• How local churches can learn to experiment and fail well, such that they learn.
• How might a whole denomination transform itself towards embodying the mission of God?
• Astute, hermeneutically aware bible scholarship on the future of the contemporary church.
• Implications for theological education of the local church ‘as the hermeneutic of the gospel’.
• Contextual studies of transformative churches from wide-ranging places – from the deeply secular to say, animist/shamanist contexts and everything in between.
• What kind of leadership is required for the local church to embody the mission of God?
• What does a local church need to know before it can engage in mission?
• Systemic studies of local churches and the systems that support them.

However, we are also interested in receiving MA work that has a broader remit around mission and evangelism.

The deadline for submission is 30 April 2021.

If you have any questions about the MA Prize in mission, evangelism and church planting please email our Principal Officer for Mission and Evangelism, Rev Dr Ben Aldous.