Transforming Church Conflict: New Course!
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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
October 2008 has been a significant watershed for Bridge Builders as we have led the first of our newly-designed Transforming Church Conflict five-day courses. We have run a five-day mediation and facilitation skills course since 1996 to widespread acclaim and consistently positive feedback. But we saw a need to shift from that course for several reasons. In particular we concluded that most church leaders do not need formal mediation training, even if they do need some enhanced skills, and because we needed a course that could be more sustainably offered several times a year by the Bridge Builders team.
So we took the decision in 2007 that we would separate out our training in interpersonal mediation process from our foundational week-long course. In the middle of October we pioneered our new Transforming Church Conflict course, and we were very encouraged by the positive feedback – as good as if not better than the feedback on our old course.
The decision to radically change our foundational training seems to have been the right one, and represents a major step forward for us. We have a course that better meets the needs of most church leaders, that better achieves Bridge Builders’ objectives of equipping leaders to be part of changing the culture of how conflict is handled in British churches, and which can sustainably be offered on a regular basis. Check out www.menno.org.uk for dates of when the course will be running in 2009.