The Churches Together in England MA Prize was an annual award for the best thesis around the themes of mission, evangelism and church planting which ran from 2021-2026.
The final MA Mission Prize was awarded in 2025.
About the MA prize
Churches Together in England (CTE), alongside the Mission Research Network, sought high quality, recently passed MA theses to add to a small but growing repository of MA and PhD theses, made available in the Mission Research Library on the CTE website. Students submitted their work directly to CTE, or Theological Educational Institutions proposed the work of some of their best MA candidates. As a guideline, to be considered for the prize the submission normally had received a mark of high 60s into the 70s.
MA work needed to fall 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.
Some MA work was received that has a broader remit around mission and evangelism, however all the MAs were focused on the UK context.
Some entries were considered for publication in Ecclesial Futures published by Radboud University Press.
For more information please contact CTE’s Ben Aldous.