Westhill College (1907) was also begun by Quakers, at first to train Sunday school teachers with, from 1912, a governing body which included representatives from the main Free Churches in the UK.
Attracted by Kingsmead, three Free Church mission agencies (Baptist, Congregationalist and Presbyterian) jointly founded Carey Hall (1912) as a training college for women missionaries.
In the 1970s the numbers of Christian missionaries being sent overseas by UK-based missionary societies declined, and the 'missionary colleges' increasingly provided training and experience for church leaders and administrators from across the developing world, who could also sit for certificates or diplomas awarded by Westhill College or diplomas or degrees awarded by the Department of Mission, in association with the Theology Department at the University of Birmingham, whose first Professor of Theology, from 1940, was endowed by the Quaker Edward Cadbury.
Newbigin had played a leading role as one of the founders of the Church of South India, where he had been Bishop of Madurai Ramnad from 1947-1959, after which he became the General Secretary of the International Missionary Council and oversaw its integration with the World Council of Churches, of which he became Associate General Secretary, until he returned to South India where he served as Bishop of Madras from 1965-1974.
One of his ambitions, expressed in the creation of the Black and White Christian Partnership in 1978, was to bring the Pentecostal churches into the ecumenical movement.
It recruited a remarkable set of leaders: Roswith Gerloff, who directed the Centre from 1978 to 1984 and explored the concept of “reverse mission” where previously poor or colonised nations send missionaries to previously rich ones; her co-director, the South African Mongani Mazibuko;[10] their successor, Bishop Joe Aldred; his successor, the Roman Catholic White Father and Bishop, Patrick Kalilombe, from Malawi; the theologian Anthony G. Reddie and many others.
He was also a successful businessman: he and his wife Elnora created Carfax Publishing which assembled a portfolio of academic journals which was sold to Routledge in 1997.
When he died in 1989 he left £2.5m to establish a Chair of Global Ethics at Selly Oak Colleges – eventually located in the University of Birmingham.
In the following year Edward Cadbury provided a new library building to house the growing number of books and the Mingana Collection of 3,000 manuscripts from the Middle East.
[11] In the 1980s it pioneered dialogue between Christians and Muslims and between the black-led churches, e.g. of inner-city Birmingham, and the mainstream, and a broad theology of mission.
It also developed strong links with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa[12] Throughout its life it influenced both the theologies and the practices of churches overseas through its teaching and its open-minded approaches to issues of controversy.
Most of those who taught, and many who came to study, were profoundly influenced by the experience, not just of formal lessons but also of the collegiality, the openness, the opportunities to debate and discuss with those from other backgrounds.
The Centre for Black and White Christian Partnership ended in 1999, and St Andrew's Hall closed in 2000 after the Baptist Missionary Society withdrew from the partnership with the United Reformed Church and the Council for World Mission; the buildings remain in use as the International Mission Centre, training missionaries for the BMS.
The College of the Ascension site was refurbished and expanded as the Al-Mahdi Institute – ironic in that this order of Shia Muslims would, in earlier years, have been the perfect partner for further explorations of the common ground between Christianity and Islam.
It meant the loss of a culture, a way of working, of inclusiveness engendered by small institutions, of contacts overseas and within the churches in this country.
This is important for the tasks which lie ahead of us, namely, the search for a just world order, the overcoming of the threat of nuclear war and the solution of the ecological crisis.
There is no way, other than by encounter, open respect, sharing of personal and communal stories in the Lord, that mutual trust will grow and barriers will be overcome, for that is what mission is about.
(Marcella Hoesl in Encounters in Mission: Two World Conferences, Occasional Paper No.2, Selly Oak Colleges, 1989, pp.
The third test is whether the approach takes account of the experiences of the poor whose practical insights into the effects of economic policies are as important as the predictions of the theorists.
(Michael Taylor, then Director of Christian Aid in Jesus and the International Financial Institutions, Occasional Paper No.17, Selly Oak Colleges, 1996, p. 5 ISBN 0-900653-22-1