Our History

Beginnings

In the 1980s and 90s many new churches were planted in the UK, forming new relational networks but many of the emerging leaders had no specific leadership or theology training. In this context Peter Butt pioneered School of Ministries with a vision to equip church leaders and aspiring leader. Peter commenced this ministry in Essex before moving to Southampton where he became part of the Cornerstone Network. As the ministry developed Peter drew together a team of gifted teachers and trainers to develop a comprehensive leadership training programme. At that time this programme was used extensively across the Cornerstone Network and beyond.

In more recent days SOM courses have been taught in Kosovo with more planned and a few UK churches have expressed an interest in running courses in 2024. A key feature of School of Ministries has been the development of key international partners. The ministry began as a UK led organisation but as it has developed SOM have identified local partners and leaders who share in the administration and direction of the work and who are able to ensure that local thinking is embraced in the way we do things.

Equally, in the early days the modules were predominantly taught by UK teachers who travelled to the country running a school. But over the years a number of those taught have become teachers themselves and currently most of our modules are taught by local teachers. Where there is a request to start a school and a suitable teacher is not available and it is not possible for an existing teacher to travel to the location we provide videos of the module being taught by an existing teacher.

SOM currently operates as a ministry of the New Community Network. In the last few years New Community released Billy Kenedy to develop Pioneer international. Around the same time Peter Butt decided it was time to retire from leading SOM and handing over the leadership to Billy and a small executive team. An unexpected consequence of this has been that many of the SOM ministry centres have become part of Pioneer and many of the churches wanting to join Pioneer international have expressed a desire to use the SOM materials.

As such an almost organic partnership has emerged between Pioneer international and School of Ministries. As such it would seem sensible for SOM to migrate from New Community Network to the Pioneer Network.

Moving forward the almost exponential growth of both Pioneer international and SOM means that Billy will focus on developing the Pioneer network and so during 2024 the leadership of SOM will transition to Paul Turner who is already part of the SOM core team

Asia

In the late 1990s Peter was also developing relationship with a key leader in India, and SOM was started in Asia. Since that time training courses have been set up in numerous cities across India training thousands of leaders.

Connections were then made with Jim and Evelyn Palmer who, having retired from church ministry, were working in the Philippines. They picked up the SOM programme and established training courses in a number of places on the major island of Mindanao.

Our India leader has now taken on the oversight of all SOM work in Asia and has been establishing training centres in Nepal.