IBTS is delighted to be able to congratulate Elie Haddad on the successful defence of his PhD thesis at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Elie is well known throughout the European Baptist Federation (EBF) and serves as the President of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS) in Lebanon. Elie's thesis was entitled 'Developing a Missional Ecclesiology for the Local Baptist Church in Lebanon' and provided an assessment of how the Lebanese crises of the last ten years, as well as theological education, have helped shape the Lebanese Baptist Church. Elie said, "My ultimate passion is to witness a Lebanese Baptist Church with an effective missional witness among its neighbors. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to offer a theological framework for the Lebanese Baptist Church to consider as it revisits its ecclesiology to match its evolving praxis."Research and Conferences
IBTSC is committed to programmes of high quality academic research and to organising strategic conferences on theological and related topics.
Our key Research Areas
Identity 
Mission
Practice
Our Conferences
We organise regularly our Hughey and Nordenhaug lectures presented by visiting established scholars in the appropriate fields. The Hughey series concentrates on the themes of Baptist History and Identity, the Nordenhaug series on Social Ethics.
Students, researchers, and academics who attend our conferences are invited to present papers for discussion with the possibility of further review for publication in our Academic Journal.
We also host mini-conferences bringing together scholars and researchers in specific fields of interest to our constituency. Some of these will be recorded and some live streamed in order to allow our students to participate.
Our Programmes
Central to our research portfolio is the PhD programme we deliver. At present the research topics our PhD students are studying include:
- “An Inquiry into the Emerging Church Paradigm as a Way Forward for Church Planting and Church Renewal in Sweden”
- “Christian Peacemaking in the context of Convictions, Scripture and Conflict”
- “The Contribution of Yves Congar to the Re-emergence of Pneumatology in 20th Century Western Theology”
- “A Movement in Crisis: The Journey of the Hutterite Brethren through Transylvania”
- “Tending Forgiveness: Restore the Broken Garden of the World”
- “The Origins and Development of the First Czech Baptist Church in Bohemia in the Political, Social and Religious Context of Central Europe (1858 – 1918)”
