St. Mellitus College, a new fast-growing Seminary in the Church of England [Telegraph]

St. Mellitus College, a new fast-growing Seminary in the Church of England

Just as the season of Advent began last week, I found myself in a large church in Earl’s Court. (I was there to give a speech about Baroness Thatcher and God – two strong characters whose relationship interests me.) The church is dedicated to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Sometimes people put the Church of England in that sad category over which St Jude presides.

But although the Earl’s Court church is still called St Jude’s, what goes on inside it has the name of a different saint. It is called St Mellitus College – Mellitus being the first bishop of London – and it is heaving with youthful activity. What is happening there is the very opposite of a lost cause. It may be the future of the Church of England.

St Mellitus College was formed in 2007 by Mellitus’s latest successor, Richard Chartres – the man who preached at the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton and at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. His diocese and that of Chelmsford got together with the famous evangelical church of Holy Trinity Brompton, which nurtured the Alpha Course and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. They formed the first wholly non-residential theological college.

The idea – which, like most “new” things, is actually extremely old – is to train would-be priests in theology while at the same time making them work in parish churches. The study is academically rigorous – Hebrew, Greek and all that – but always balanced by ministering to actual people. It is the godly version of learning clinical medicine scientifically while also treating patients.

It is also new in combining the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England with the evangelical Protestant wing. Two groups which had traditionally been at war had come to see that their differences were mostly trivial. They realised they were united in what they like to call “a generous orthodoxy”.



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Does anyone personally know any seminarians attending St. Mellitus?