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When I was a lad growing up in Glasgow, I was mentored in to youth ministry leadership through summer camps and volunteers in my local church. Faithful amateurs took me hill walking and canoeing, sat with my painful attempts to play in the church band and gave me mini-experiences of speaking up front, visiting the sick and planning bigger events.

The word theology derives from two Greek words, theos, which means God, and logos, which means word or words. Put simply, therefore, theology means words about God and that makes every person a theologian because everyone has words to describe God. Even the person who says there is no God has a theology, they are using words to describe him.

This Giving Tuesday, we reflect on what giving means in other cultures. Our Director of Partnerships and Development has been in India for the last three months, living in a community in Orissa, India. Their family are supporting the charity Love the One, so Will has been working remotely. We asked him some questions about around giving in such a diverse place as India.

Our senior lecturer in children and family ministry, Rachel Turner, publishes her latest work 'Parenting Teens for a Life of Faith'. This book will help all parents, carers, grandparents and others involved in teens’ everyday lives to understand the teenage faith journey more and find their place within it.

Around twenty years ago, working as a director for a local Youth for Christ centre, I was given the chance to become a chaplain. At that time chaplains tended to be ordained and were most often found in the faith school and public school sector. I had no one to ask about the role and no training I could get to grips with. There were no books, no networks and no courses like those now running with CYM.

We are in contact with a number of churches offering opportunities to study with us whilst earning a salary – yes, you heard that right! Find out more in this blog post.

CYM students can study on a range of different pathways. At undergraduate level, they spend the first year exploring and discerning God’s call before embarking on a programme of study in Chaplaincy, Children’s and Family Ministry, Community Youth Work (with JNC) or Community Ministry. Our postgraduate students are able to study pathways in Christian Leadership in Context, Youth and Community Work, Children’s and Family Work and Chaplaincy. Within each of these pathways, our students are engaged in a rich array of practices.

Each of us has a perspective, a point of view, an opinion or a story to tell about what has happened in our lives, what is happening now, and what we believe will happen. Our story – as we see it, is the story we tell ourselves – with all of our subjective worries, fears and exaggerations, the things we have missed in our retelling so don’t realise where our gaps are. The story that we live is often incomplete, filled with inconsistency and unresolved challenges and issues.

What does it mean to be a ‘professional’? Should those engaged in, or exploring a call to ministry seek such a label? Does it matter?  These are all big and important questions to wrestle with.