Advanced Courses

This three-day course is for people who have already completed a foundation course with Bridge Builders, and want to share some of the skills and insights about conflict that they have learned.

Since 1996, Bridge Builders has led dozens of introductory workshops and courses throughout the UK for a wide variety of church groups. Training of Trainers draws on that experience to equip others to lead a day-long workshop. Along with offering a trainer’s manual, the course provides detailed guidelines on how to lead elements of a workshop using Bridge Builders’ workshop manual. The course also enables participants to explore how the materials might be adapted to their own church and denominational context.

Bridge Builders’ vision is to help Christians and the church to learn to handle conflict, deal with differences, engage respectfully with one another, and make decisions in collaborative and consensual ways – so that we can live out the gospel that Jesus revealed. Our expectation is that this will transform the church’s witness and outreach to the world. Learn how to help spread this vision for the church!

The course includes teaching, group work and practice. Practical in focus, the sessions seek to demonstrate Bridge Builders’ active approach to education and learning. Each day include times of prayer and worship.

This five-day residential course is for people who have already completed a foundation course with Bridge Builders.

What can you do when a relationship between two fellow Christians is strained? While you can pray for them, you may also be in a position to bring them together to try to address the reasons for tension. If feelings are not yet running very high, this can be a fairly informal process. But if the level of tension has escalated, a more formal approach is needed.

This course introduces a carefully-structured process that you practise step by step. Although the focus is on transforming conflicts among Christians, the skills that you learn can also be used wherever there is a role, formal or informal, for intervention by a third party mediator. The course is particularly relevant for anyone who wants to be part of a local or regional mediation team in their denomination.

If you’ve gained an appetite for practical peace-making, and you want to be equipped to be a confident mediator, then Mediating Interpersonal Conflicts is the course for you.

This forty-eight-hour advanced training course equips you to work for reconciliation with church groups that are handling conflict poorly. It builds upon skills and understanding learned in Bridge Builders foundation courses.