Managing Difficult Church Change TRS1031E

  • Academic Session: 2024-25
  • School: School of Critical Studies
  • Credits: 10
  • Level: Level 1 (SCQF level 7)
  • Typically Offered: Either Semester 1 or Semester 2
  • Available to Visiting Students: No
  • Taught Wholly by Distance Learning: Yes
  • Collaborative Online International Learning: No

Short Description

This course equips church leaders (lay and ordained) who are active in local church contexts and responding to internal and external pressures of changed. It will explore how to identify, analyse and interpret the organisational challenges facing your church and introduce processes and actions to develop the responses required, with the aim of longer term flourishing. This will include identifying the spiritual practices and skills leaders need to navigate and facilitate difficult change.

Timetable

10 x 2hr lectures 

Requirements of Entry

None

Excluded Courses

None

Co-requisites

None

Assessment

Reflective assignment (800 words) - 40%

Report (1200 words) - 60% 

Course Aims

This course aims to:

■ Provide participants with critical, interpretive and practical tools for responding to local church challenges resulting from internal and external pressures of change

■ Increase participants' confidence in negotiating organisational uncertainty and expectations of change

■ Help participants identify and address organisational challenges in their church

Intended Learning Outcomes of Course

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Identify key organisational challenges facing the church; 

■ Evaluate and interpret the technical and cultural nature of those challenges; 

■ Develop a strategy and action plan for addressing those challenges that is accountable, and takes ecclesial, theological and behavioural factors into consideration;

■ Reflect critically on their leadership practice. 

Minimum Requirement for Award of Credits

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.