Placement Churches
We believe that partnering with Oasis College provides real benefits for churches seeking to expand and develop their work with children , young people and familise. We see placement churches as training institutions operating in partnership with Oasis. Main placements provide a vital role in the training and equipping of our students, and reap great benefits in the process.
Young people are vital for the future of the Church. The research conducted by Dr Peter Brierley as part of the 2005 English Church Census states that, although 59% of England’s churches have no young people aged 15-19 in their Sunday congregations or youth work programmes, the churches that are growing in the UK are the ones that are investing now in working with children and young people. The future of church life in this country may be dependent on reaching out to the current broken and fatherless generation of young people and revealing to them the God of Love.
If you are reading this then hopefully you are as convinced as we are of the importance of the church working with children and young people in our society. Yet youth programmes, especially youth outreach programmes, involve time, skill, energy and experience; resources that it can be a challenge for churches to provide.
Oasis has a passion for equipping the church to be more effective in revealing God's heart of compassion to society. As part of that passion we have been training youth ministers for over 15 years. The current Oasis Youth Work and Ministry Course has developed from this training experience, alongside Oasis’ own 21-year history of youth outreach and care provision. The course is designed to train practitioners who will be fully equipped to work in both secular youth and children's work and church youth ministry contexts, with a raft of skills together with an understanding of the psychological, sociological and theological factors that influence and shape young people.
Our degree courses are designed to combine the theoretical with the practical, enabling students to immediately ground what they have learnt in the classroom in a real children's work/youth work context. To enable us to do this we partner with churches; with Oasis providing students full of drive and inspiration, whilst the churches provide a training context for the students to practice their new skills.
“The course has been a trailblazer, thought leader and model of great practice for churches seeking to grapple with the challenges and opportunities of youth work and ministry. ALOVE, The Salvation Army for a new generation, is indebted to the Oasis course for its unique blend of youth work training, theological and ministerial formation and practical support for local churches. The programme has, and continues to play a vital role in our bid to identify and equip a new generation of youth workers.”
Russ Rook, head of ALOVE, the Salvation Army for a new generation