As well as training candidates for the priesthood, diaconate and Lay Readership, SEI has a remit to facilitate learning-for-all across the Province, as those present at General Synod heard on Friday 10 June.
The Revd Dr Michael Hull, SEI’s Director of Studies, began by reminding his audience of the centrality of discipleship:
Over two thousand years of church history, we’ve ascribed all sorts of titles to Jesus, but the one used most often by his disciples is simply ‘rabbi’, teacher. After His resurrection, when Jesus calls Mary Magdalene by her name, she responds in the vocative, ‘Rabboni’, teacher. That’s how Mary sees Him, experiences Him.
Fast forward to 2022. We are Jesus’s disciples, and therefore we are ever anxious to learn more about the fullness of God’s revelation that Jesus embodies. Discipleship for the whole church means that such learning is not just for clergy and authorized ministers, but for us all!
He then outlined the ways in which SEI has been facilitating lay learning in the past three years: from a pilot project in the Diocese of Argyll and The Isles on doctrine back in 2019, a book group, a Lent 2021 course on ‘Acting like a Christian’ and an Advent 2021 course on ‘Reading the Bible like an Episcopalian’. With the latter attracting 250 people to the Zoom room, the format – hitherto a half-hour talk followed by discussion – needed to be changed to that of a lecture.
In the case of the most recent offering, ‘Episcopalians and Their Ethics’, yet more changes were made, with the sessions being recorded in advance and made available on YouTube. This added versatility meant that congregations could use the material in whatever way they wished – as indeed we heard from one Rector present at Synod, the Revd Willie Shaw. He described how congregational members in Grangemouth, Bo’ness and Falkirk (Diocese of Edinburgh) had watched the Lent material and then met to discuss it and apply its teaching to their own lives of discipleship.
Mrs Patsy Thomson, Warden of Lay Readers in the Diocese of Moray, Ross and Caithness, joining by Zoom from Cromarty, also stressed the issue of the contextual application of the material. Speaking passionately from the heart as a lay theologian, she praised the courses run by Dr Hull and the Revd Dr Richard Tiplady which people in that diocese had found not only informative and energising but deeply relevant to their lives of Christian discipleship and helpful for their missional engagement within their communities.
Dr Hull ended by observing that not only is it is clear that God’s people want to know more and more about God, but that as a Church we have been forced into sharpening our technological skills in recent years. In wishing to continue to join that hunger to that newfound ability, ‘SEI’, he said, ’needs feedback from you, from Synod, from the whole church to know what the Holy Spirit is asking of us in terms of developing content to support our discipleship and our missional future.’
Synod members then discussed what they would like to see offered in the years to come; SEI staff eagerly await the feedback from each table group’s deliberations, which will help shape our future provision for God’s people.
To watch the pre-recorded teaching content from some of the courses mentioned above, visit our Short Courses page here. Information from forthcoming courses will be shared on this page and the SEI Facebook page as it becomes available.
