Academic research can fall into a number of categories. Sometimes research might be very useful or helpful for everyday situations, but it ends up sitting in a university library gathering dust. Sometimes it can be so technical and obscure that one needs a whole new vocabulary to translate what it means. At other times, research challenges and encourages us to try new things and can bring renewal or hope.
Part of the work of the Mission Research Network (which is a CTE co-ordinating group) is to encourage, ‘a robust, vibrant, critical and independent mission research community in the UK to resource God’s Church in mission.’
One way of doing this is to host spaces for young or early-stage researchers doing doctoral work on mission-shaped topics. Another is through our annual ‘MA in Mission prize’, which launched in 2021 and has awarded prices in 2022 and 2024. This initiative is linked to the Ecclesial Futures Journal.
The Oxford Centre for Mission Studies has an excellent resource of free books published by Regnum which are downloadable and include topics around mission, ecumenism, creation care, power, migration and more. Find the page here
Our mission research library
We also gather high quality MAs and PhDs that have been written around mission, evangelism and church planting in the UK since 2000, and host these in our new mission research library. The library brings together a wide range of scholarship, from PhD work on Messy Church to the use of photography as a tool for missional prayer.
You can search the library by topic, date, church or institution. Many of the research works are available for download from our site, or via a link to the repository of the institution where the thesis was submitted.
As of July 2024 the library has 130 theses and we are adding to it every 6 months or so. If you have written or authored an MA or PhD on a mission-related topic based in the UK, we would love to hear from you. We are especially keen to include work from Orthodox, Pentecostal and Charismatic perspectives. Contact CTE’s Principal Officer for Mission and Evangelism Ben Aldous for more details.
CTE’s archives
CTE has been in existence for over 30 years now, and we have much in our archives which may be use for those who are interested in the development of ecumenism in England since 1990. Some of this is accessible from the new website, while other archival material is housed in the basement at 27 Tavistock Square. Should you wish to access this please contact Ben Aldous or our Operations Manager Lorraine Shannon.