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| A Brief History of the Charles Simeon Trust In 1998, pastors David Helm and Jon Dennis began work on planting a church on the South Side of Chicago. The plant was mandated and initially supported by their home church, College Church in Wheaton. The small congregation, which would become known as Holy Trinity Church, was founded later that year in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago. From the very beginning, Holy Trinity Church had training in its plans. In fact, the third of the three divisions in its philosophy of ministry paper is dedicated to the idea of training to instill God’s Word in others. And so, Helm and Dennis took special care to identify young, promising men and women for the purposes of training them for ministry. The first few years brought each year one or two young men in the midst of seminary. As the initiative grew, so did the need to commit resources and time to training. In 2000-2001, Chicago Plan was born. It combined three distinct elements: classroom style teaching, ministry exposure in a real life church and mentoring from a practicing pastor. The program had grown to six or seven participants each year. Meanwhile, College Church in Wheaton was continuing to host its annual Workshop on Biblical Exposition—a workshop inspired by and modeled after those of Dick Lucas and the Proclamation Trust in London. The Wheaton workshop was rapidly growing to the point of warranting new locations. Partner churches around the US began to host regional iterations of the workshops. With the Workshops on Biblical Exposition growing so quickly and the Chicago Plan needing institutional support, a new organization was needed. The Charles Simeon Trust was founded in January 2001 by David Helm, Jon Dennis and Kent Hughes (then of College Church). Its objective: manage these two initiatives. By 2007, the Chicago Plan had grown to 25 students. The classroom style teaching still took place on a single afternoon and the participants were working in five different churches/congregations and being mentored by five different pastors. Given the swift expansion, it was once again time to evaluate the infrastructure and the methodology. Along with a newly hired Director of Training, the Director of Ministries and the Executive Director began working on a new training scheme to be called the Simeon Course on Biblical Exposition. The coursework will take place on multiple days. The depth will be increased and the focus sharpened. And with the ability to distribute the training modules through the Internet, the course will be available everywhere in the world at any time. The workshops continued to grow. Workshops are being held in 10 locations regularly, including three in Canada and one in Nairobi, Kenya. Naturally, with the rapid growth of the workshops, adequate expert leadership became a significant need. In the fall 2006, the Trust convened a team of 12 pastors coordinated by David Helm and Kent Hughes to define, develop and support the workshops. Since 2006, the Charles Simeon Trust has added a few initiatives beyond its commitments to the workshops and training. Among them are Simeon Media, a repository of books, documents, audio and video concerning the practice of expository preaching and Simeon House, a planned consortium of pastors and scholars dedicated to assisting the church through Biblical research. |