A Anglicanism, Methodism and Ecumenism: A History of Queen's and Handsworth Colleges

Description

For almost 200 years, the city of Birmingham has been a key location for the training of clergy. From 1828 Anglican clergy studied at the Queen's College and in 1881 the Methodist Church developed their own training facility at Handsworth College. In this book, Andrew Chandler tells the tale of these two colleges. This is a history not simply of the creation and evolution of these two religious institutions, but a study full of significance for the wider history of Christianity in British society across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The foundation of both colleges occurred in a confident age of civic progress and reform and their subsequent histories reveal much that was at work in the experience of the British churches at large. They were at first expressions of denominational identity and a determination to educate a class of clergy. In time they found themselves negotiating new prospects within the ecumenical currents of a later age and the deepening realities of secularization. In 1970 they united. This is a book which blends local, national and international dimensions and also shows how the two theological colleges came to embrace all kinds of intellectual, cultural, social and political history in a period of restless change.

Andrew Chandler is Professor in Modern History at the University of Chichester and has previously taught at the Universities of Birmingham and Keele. He has also been a Visiting Lecturer at the University of British Columbia. Chandler's interests embrace the interrelationship between politics, religion and diplomacy across the twentieth century. He is the author of The Church of England in the Twentieth Century; Archbishop Fisher: Church, State and World (with David Hein) and Piety and Provocation: The Life and World of George Bell.

`The history of theological education in Britain is a relatively neglected subject. Andrew Chandler's impressive study of the joint history of the Queen's Foundation in Birmingham, drawing together development of the Anglican Queen's and the Methodist Handsworth colleges, will be an important contribution to making good that deficit. What he offers is something more than institutional history. It is the register of an entire ecclesiastical and educational culture as it came into being in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and then adapted in order to survive into the twentieth century and beyond. Chandler's assured grasp of the sources never lets the bigger picture slip out of sight, and his highly readable text is peppered with acute observations and forthright comment. It is a masterpiece of succinct scholarship.' - Jeremy Morris, King's College, Cambridge, `Historians too often forget the role that has been played by institutions in shaping the past. Andrew Chandler's new book on the history of the Queen's and Handsworth Colleges in Birmingham does not make that mistake. He provides a fascinating history of the two colleges, one Anglican and the other Methodist, which have together shaped the lives of numerous students since the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Chandler's book succeeds in making the history of the colleges come alive in his portraits of the people who worked and studied in them. He also shows how the development of the colleges was constantly affected by changes in the wider world. This book shows how places like Queens and Handsworth possessed an ethos of service and respect for the individual that is increasingly fragile today.' - Michael Hughes, University of Lancaster, `Andrew Chandler's delightful micro-history of the Queen's Foundation in Birmingham is written with verve and panache. In vivid colours he brings the characters to life, and sheds light far beyond the college walls upon the varied fortunes of Anglican and Methodist ministry during two centuries of rapid cultural change.' - Andrew Atherstone, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford