Discipleship

Security in Christ

As a new Church is born, teaching must occur to show how their identity has fundamentally shifted from: death to life, from Satan’s family to God's family, moving from wrath to peace, heirs with Christ, indwelled by the Spirit, sealed, a new calling etc. New believers must start to have a body of truth developed from God’s Word. As their old realms of reality (Appendix II) are being rejected, they must be replaced by something new. We need to be the ones replacing these realms with faithful teaching from God’s story.

Changing Worldviews

The best way to bring about a changed life is to minister at a worldview level. Addressing people’s core assumptions about reality and replacing their metanarrative with a Biblical one must take place. People’s Core assumptions come from their collective, personal life stories and experiences from the past and present, and from these stories indigenous “truth/s” or “core assumptions” emerge which the people perceive to be helpful in bringing order and meaning to their lives and living. We have studied extensively at training what it takes to minister at a worldview level, addressing the ten realms of reality (Appendix II) and have studied the worldview of an animist. Ministering at a worldview level effects how we do all our ministry as it is a means to maturity. Teaching Chronologically the story of scripture and avoiding topical teaching helps to build a body of truth, replacing their currently held worldview assumption and metanarrative with Gods worldview and metanarrative. People will need a new story in order to extract truth from, Gods story. Topical teaching only addresses symptoms of a root, and will never reach the root cause, the worldview. If you do not teach at a worldview level the gospel will become syncretized as it has been all over the world.

Training Tribal Teachers

Raising up teachers in the church is crucial for its health and longevity, as we do not plan on staying there forever. The people must take ownership of the church and its well-being. Raising teachers in the church starts long before the church is born. We will leverage every opportunity early on in our ministry to develop teachers along the way. We have carefully thought through how to use housebuilding, literacy, translation, curriculum development prior to salvation to prepare people for these roles. After some are saved, we can more directly disciple people into teaching positions, show how to study the Word of God, find its meanings and present accurate truth to the body of believers in an impactful way and live above reproach.

Because God is, by nature, outward flowing and self-giving, the Holy Spirit will not lead the church into indifference about outreach. The ability to reproduce is a sign of coming to maturity and it is no different with the church. We will help guide the new church as they reach out into the community and neighboring villages. Since we have molded outreach for several years at this point we can draw upon that as an example for the people to follow. This will be an exciting time as people are anxious to share their new faith and the Holy Spirit is working through people in a new culture for the first time. This provides a great opportunity to disciple believers to share their faith in effective ways and learn to communicate spiritual truths clearly.


Discipling Leaders

Although we will be acting as church leadership for a time, the church should not be dependent on us forever. God will be faithful to give the church the gifts and abilities to be able to grow to maturity. We want to educate the church and make sure the believers understand the roles and qualifications of elders and deacons as they will be the ones to identify and appoint their church leaders. This knowledge would require the teaching from a minimum of Acts, Romans, Ephesians, 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy and Titus. We will be careful at this time not to decide who we think would be a good leader but let the Lord raise up leader from the congregation and disciple those individuals for positions of leadership. We will not be discipling leaders exclusively, but the entire church is also to be equipped for the work of ministry. (Eph. 4:11-13)

Practical Theology

It is important to have correct biblical theology and doctrine in order for the church to mature. When Paul addresses Timothy, the first thing he writes about is false doctrine and the teaching of sound doctrine. Theology and doctrine are applicable to aspects of everyday life. The way we view and understand God, the work of Christ and the implications of it should be at the forefront of our minds and impact every decision we make. Wrong doctrine eats away at our spiritual life like a sickness, it affects courage, spiritual fruit, joy, patience, love, hope etc. Everyone already has a doctrine and theology, our goal is to correct those beliefs to bring them in line with truth. Our theology is practical and always transpires down into our life and impacts our daily life in every facet.