The Churches Together in England MA Prize is an annual award for the best thesis around the themes of mission, evangelism and church planting.
The prize consists of a £100 cash gift and an opportunity for the MA to appear in an edited format (6,000 words) in the recently launched Ecclesial Futures published by Radboud University Press
The 2024 prize is now open
More about the MA prize
Churches Together in England (CTE), alongside the Mission Research Network, is looking for 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 can submit their work directly to CTE, or Theological Educational Institutions can propose the work of some of their best MA candidates. As a guideline, to be considered for the prize the submission will normally have received a mark of high 60s into the 70s.
We are looking for MA work that potentially falls 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.
We are also interested in receiving MA work that has a broader remit around mission and evangelism however the MA must be focused on the UK context.
The judges for the 2024 prize are
- Dr Marina Ngursangzeli Behera (Oxford Centre for Mission Studies)
- Rev Dr Israel Olofinjana (Evangelical Alliance)
Criteria for Applicants in 2024
- You will have completed a post-graduate degree at Master’s level with a dissertation in one of the fields specified above
- You will normally have received the official notification of the dissertation mark during 2023/24.
The Committee reserves the right not to award a prize in any given year, as well as the right not to designate a runner-up. The Committee’s decisions are final.
Process for Applicants
To apply, email [email protected]
- ‘MA Prize 2024’ in the subject line.
- Your name, address, telephone number and e-mail.
- The name of the course you studied and the institution where you studied.
- The title of your dissertation.
- The mark awarded for your dissertation.
Send your email by the deadline for submissions is Tuesday 30 April 2024. To the e-mail please attach a Word Document or PDF containing
- The title of the dissertation and the abstract
- The Thesis itself
For more information please contact CTE’s Ben Aldous.