A New Training Course from Bridge Builders
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Bridge Builders serves in the ministry of peacemaking and reconciliation, seeking to transform conflict within the church. A programme of the London Mennonite Centre (LMC), Bridge Builders provides training, mediation, consultancy, and related services for all Christian churches and denominations in Britain.
The vision for Bridge Builders grows out of the historical Mennonite commitment to the way of peace and non-retaliation against enemies as central elements of the Christian gospel.
Visit the Bridge Builders site at
www.menno.org.uk/bridgebuilders
by Colin Patterson
2008 is an exciting new year for Bridge Builders. Our ministry never stands still and we’re adapting to meet what we sense to be the direction God is leading us. This year we’re creating a new basic week-long course, a “foundation course” for Christian leaders.
Talking to those who have trained with Bridge Builders, we’ve discovered that the most transformative aspect of our ten-year-old flagship course (Skills Training for Mediation and Facilitation in the Church) has been the way it has helped people engage with new ideas about conflict – our perspective and understanding of it as well as our response to it. So in future we want the course to provide more help with making the significant shift towards viewing conflict differently - as a potentially healthy aspect of daily life, a normal catalyst for growth. We’ve also recognised for some time that those who attend our courses have made more use of new skills in facilitating groups, and in offering leadership in difficult situations, than in conducting formal interpersonal mediations.
Nevertheless, a significant minority of our “graduates” want to develop a more specialised ministry in mediation, having got some basic skills under their belts. So our new course Transforming Church Conflict, while retaining the key work on communication skills and self awareness, and still giving an introduction to mediation, will broaden the range of other “conflict skills” covered. We pray that it will be an exciting foundation course for Christian leaders who want to contribute positively to the lives of others and to the health and vitality of their congregations and work places.
Transforming Church Conflict will become the usual prerequisite for further training with Bridge Builders. Beginning in 2009, we will run a more specialised course on mediation, with more time devoted to practice and assimilating the process. Those wishing to attend our Training of Trainers course (offered yearly) and group consultancy course (offered every other year) will have had to complete our foundation course first. Those who have completed the earlier version (Skills Training for Mediation and Facilitation) will be able to count the course as equal to the new foundation course, serving as a prerequisite for further training. We still plan to offer Richard Blackburn’s Church Leadership & Family Systems course regularly, with no prerequisite.
For more details of Bridge Builders courses, visit www.menno.org.uk/bridgebuilders