Luther King Centre congratulates Daleen Ten Cate – MA in Mission prize winner 2021

Luther King Centre congratulates Daleen Ten Cate – MA in Mission prize winner 2021
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June 10, 2021

One of our graduate students here at Luther King Centre is this year’s winner of the MA in Mission prize. The Rev Daleen Ten Cate wrote her MA dissertation on “A critical examination of the theological basis of a Christian Charity engaged in community ministry”, and this was deemed by the judges to be a robust and rigorous piece of work.

Churches Together in England (CTE),alongside the Mission Research Network, set up the MA Mission Prize to draw out high-quality, recently passed MA theses to add to a small but growing repository of MAs and PhDs which will be made available on their new website.

In the inaugural year of the prize, 25entries were received from students based in a wide range of locations from Falmouth, Cornwall to Barrow in Cumbria and representing a range of denominations from the 51 Member Churches of CTE. A short list of 5dissertations was passed on to the judges Rt Rev Michael Beasley (Bishop of Hertford and CTE Trustee), Dr Cathy Ross (Church Mission Society) and Rev Phyllis Thompson (New Testament Church of God) who chose Daleen’s study.

Daleen receives a £100 cash gift and an opportunity for the MA to appear in an edited format (6,000 words) in the recently launched journal Ecclesial Futures, published by Wipf and Stock, which she will be working on with her dissertation supervisor.

The judges said they were impressed by the passion and level of engagement that Daleen showed in her work and the way in which she had rolled up her sleeves and got her hands dirty volunteering for six months, building relationships and the level of reflexivity was significant.

Originally from South Africa and an Afrikaaner, Daleen moved to the UK 22 years ago learning English at a local village school. Daleen said that at heart she wasn’t an academic but a practitioner who really just wanted to put faith into action. Daleen came to study with us here at LKC, completed her MA in Contextual Theology, and is now an ordained URC minister based just outside Blackburn. She works as a Missional Discipleship mentor with 37 churches across Lancashire.  

Daleen paid tribute to LKC: “All the credit goes to you all who have made me believe that I could do a MA in the first place and who supported and encouraged me all the way. Contextual Theology enables practitioners, like myself, to express themselves in an academic world.” She particularly thanks her Tutor, Rev Dr Noel Irwin, and the staff at Northern College. “I still think LKC is the best place in the world, to study”, she said.

We at LKC know that much credit goes to Daleen herself! She is a much-valued member of our community, an excellent theologian, and a wonderful example of what it means to live out our Christian faith.

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