Our vision statement reads that we are “equipping people to participate in God’s kingdom through the church and in the wider world.” There are different ways through a variety of vocations that we can participate in God’s Kingdom, but fundamentally, it is God who establishes His Kingdom and we seek to be involved. At the heart of SBC’s vision is to equip students to help them flourish in God’s Kingdom through forming faithful disciples and reflective practitioners.

Faithful Disciples: While we’re a learning community that is academically robust, validated by a University, and therefore meeting the high standards of a Higher Education institution, we also expect our Christian faith to impact everything we do. Our learning community is orientated around forming students to grow in their faith over the time that they study with us. Developing character and forming disciples is not an overnight job and takes time spent in a community of believers and transformation by the Spirit of God. While we stretch our brains within the classroom, we also build faithfulness through our weekly rhythms and relationships among staff and other students. At the end of the day, we want all our students to leave the College knowing more about God, but ensuring that knowledge helps them to flourish in relationship to God through the Son and the Spirit.

Reflective Practitioners: Training often falls into one of two camps. Either it is all about acquiring knowledge to increase one’s understanding; or it’s about hands-on skills learning the “how-to”. Both have value but one without the other is only half the story. Understanding without practice can become dull and irrelevant; practice without theory often leaves people without the ability to innovate, adapt, and respond. By equipping students for God’s Kingdom we aim to increase understanding in a way which helps develop practice through theological reflection and placement-based experiences. Every full-time student has the opportunity to go on placement in their second term for the first three years of study, with the final year given over to a research project ideally aligned to their intended vocational call to develop specialist insight into their chosen field of practice. Whether seemingly more abstract or more practical, all our classes are positioned to consider “how might this impact my ministry and practices?” We want students to leave with a good understanding of their faith so they can grapple with the hard questions of life all the time being grounded in practice so they can consistently reflect on what they are doing in order to be able to continue their cycle of development long after they leave the College.

In 2024 we’ll be highlighting these key practices to show how studying with SBC can be about learning in context, especially through our online access, with reflective practice front and centre of all we do as we aim to form faithful disciples ready to serve in God’s Kingdom. If you’re excited by this vision and want to get on-board, please email graham.meiklejohn@uws.ac.uk to discuss study options or opportunities for getting involved.