Attachments and Placements

Westcott House places a unique emphasis on Contextual Theology, and this is reflected in the considerable amount of time students spend gaining pastoral and liturgical practice in context. A key anchor point for our vision of Contextual Theology is the incarnational tradition bequeathed to the college by our founder B.F. Westcott. His ethic of encounter, conversation and continual enrichment and change is at the centre of this distinctive vision.

Sunday Attachments

When students arrive at Westcott House they are welcomed by a local congregation or univeristy college chapel community to whom they will be attached, spending Sundays worshipping and praying with them over the course of the first year in training. Students find having a connection to a community beyond Westcott House enables them to ground and reflect helpfully on what they are learning through pastoral and academic courses and to keep grounded in their sense of vocation. It provides an opportunity to gain further liturgical, pastoral and preaching experience.

Attachments generally involve spending Sundays in the parish or college, and may include an occasional weekday session.

Social Context Placements

Learning to live the Gospel in a number of very diverse social institutions is one of the most challenging and enjoyable parts of training at Westcott House. We do this through a programme of "social context placements" run ecumenically through the Cambridge Theological Federation. Most ordinands undertake two social context placements in the course of training.

There is a wide range of placements, including hospices, mental health centres, prisons, primary schools, hospitals, the army, bereavement care, youth work and care of the elderly.

Students might be working in a high security prison with life sentenced prisoners, experiencing a week in the life of a British soldier and army padre, creating sculpture with 6-10 year olds from an Urban Priority Area around Scripture stories, accompanying those with terminal illness as they approach death, learning from those who are experiencing old age about their spirituality and their needs or befriending someone who has been recently bereaved.

Through these placements students learn basic pastoral skills of listening, attentiveness and self-awareness, to work with others as part of a team, how to get "under the skin" of a social institution and to respond to the challenge of living the Gospel within multi-cultural, multi-ethnic contexts.