The CMS (Church Mission Society) recently published an issue on the theme of Learning Faith. Here, issue editor James Butler tells us more.
So much of people’s learning takes place in the midst of everyday life. As humans, we grow and change through our experiences, our interactions, and through life events, both big and small. And yet, so often in the church, when thoughts turn to helping people grow and develop in their faith and as Christians, the default is the course or the programme. Our recent research project exploring the grass roots experience of learning in the Methodist Church has been exploring how Christian grow, learn, change and mature in faith. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have found that so much of this growing and changing in faith takes place in the everyday encounters.
While courses and programmes have a place, one of the key things we have learnt from our research is how people learn faith in the informal conversations and everyday experiences, and that these sites of learning need to be recognised when we want to encourage people to grow in faith.
We are delighted to be able to publish some of the findings and insights gained from working in collaboration with these sights in the new edition of Anvil Journal from the Church Mission Society (CMS) entitled ‘Learning Faith’. We saw this journal edition as an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the findings of the research for churches, denominations and organisations supporting people learning faith. In it the team working on the project, Clare Watkins, James Butler, Stan Brown, Graham Jones, and Sue Miller, all contributed to articles reflecting on their learning from the project. These articles explore: the insights for learning and for mission which comes from rural churches, the challenge our findings offer to the typical narratives around discipleship, and reflections on the way the learning we saw connects with traditional Methodist understandings of holiness and wisdom. Alongside these three main articles, there are further reflections on learning from people involved in the project in different ways.
The project ran from 2017 to 2021 and worked with eight different sites across the Methodist Church, from local churches, to circuits, from a regional learning network to formal training institutions. It was a theological action research project based at the University of Roehampton and run as a partnership between TARN (Theology and Action Research Network) and the Susanna Wesley Foundation. We hope that this edition of Anvil will give you a taste of the project, and offers some helpful questions and challenges as people seek to grow in faith and support others to do the same.