In Depth:  20schemes

Scottish church-planting project ‘20Schemes’ has exciting plans to take forward its work after the pandemic. Ben Hansen writes:

Over a year of lockdown in Scotland’s schemes has exacerbated just about every social issue in our communities. Drug use. Addictions. Abuse. Unemployment. Isolation. The list goes on. All of them worsened during the pandemic. This has provided untold challenges for our churches and church-planting teams. Scheme ministry was hard enough pre-Covid. It can seem like the darkness is winning.

At 20schemes, one of our greatest desires is to see men and women from the schemes being trained up for ministry to serve their communities. One way we do this is through enrolling all of our indigenous interns at the Ragged School of Theology (RST), a ministry of 20schemes.

The teaching style at RST suits the gifts and abilities of people who love to learn practically and actively compared to most ministry training that is academic and suits those who’ve been to university.

20schemes has launched a new website 20schemesEquip.com in response to their growing worldwide audience. Equip is a site dedicated to articles, book reviews, videos, their podcast, and much more. All content relates directly to ministry in hard communities around the world. It also highlights content written from various difficult contexts around the world.

This site is more than just a blog; it is a bank of resources. The site launched with hundreds of unique articles, organised by topic, relevant to ministry among the poor. The topics include things like addiction, abuse, suicide, mental health, and pastoral ministry.

A lot has happened with 20schemes over the course of this summer, from holiday clubs to conferences to new partnerships. God is always at work in all things, but over the past few months 20schemes have seen Him do many big things.

On 20 June, the church-planting network hosted ‘Sing Scotland’ with Keith & Kristyn Getty and John Piper. The day began with a day conference where over 300 Christians from across the UK gathered. Topics focused on how we sing corporately and the preaching of God’s word.