How Much Does A Church Planter Need To Know?

In a few weeks time, we will be running our third training week of the year. This week will be run by Bhupendra Gurung, a Nepalese leader who is currently doing further theological study in Brisbane. Because we have had disruptions to our training program this year, this week will be including a number of different lessons from different sections of our curriculum. Here is a brief synopsis of the various topics which Bhupendra will be teaching about.

For those who may be unaware, our curriculum consists of 8 subjects, which are taught over two years. For each of these eight subjects, we arrange our teachings into 8 lectures, consisting of roughly a 3 page document in English. We translate this into Nepalese and also will consider producing a video version of these notes as well which students will be able to download on their phones or watch on youtube to revise or teach to their own churches.

First up this time, we will be catching up on some lessons from a previous course which was not completed, called “Amazing Salvation”. In this course we deal with some of the meatiest theological issues which Christians have to deal with, including the doctrine of election, the doctrine of the church, and the doctrine of end times. This time we will be doing the following lectures from this unit:

Christian Perseverance and Assurance. How is it that Christians can be assured that they are indeed saved? Can they lose their salvation?

Christian Hope in the Face of Death. What does the Bible say happens to us after we die? What do the scriptures teach about the nature of Heaven and Hell?

We will also be revising our teaching on election and predestination, sanctification and adoption. As you can imagine, this is quite a challenging set of lectures with some quite in-depth theology involved.

We will also be including some selected lectures from two other more practical units- Christian Leadership and Pastoral Care.  These will include the following lectures:

Learning and Leadership. A discussion of the process of how we successfully lead people into new learning as disciples of Christ. There is more to learning than just sitting in a classroom and studying ideas. Discipleship is far more holistic.

Leadership in the Bible. A discussion of the various types of leaders described in 

 the Bible and how they may operate today.

The Skills of Pastoral Counselling. A six step process to follow when seeking to effectively help people in a pastoral conversation.

Encountering Addiction. A discussion of principles in which to help people who are struggling with various forms of bad habits and addictions.

Enriching Marriages. A 4 step process to help couples move through to improve the quality of their marriages.

In addition to these, we will be moving through a series of Bible studies on the book of Colossians. We will be teaching them to follow our usual pattern of looking at each Bible passage with three skills.

A) Describe the passage– what does it say?
B) Investigate the passage– what does it mean?
C) Gospelize the passage- what does it mean for me?

With notes provided responding to the most frequently asked questions on Colossians, we’re hoping that not only will they grow deeper in many of the important themes which arise in Colossians, but also they’ll grow to be more strongly equipped in leading their own people in Bible studies on any passage.

Please join us in prayer for a very fruitful third Training Week coming up, for safety for Bhupendra in his travels, and for God’s blessing on our students and ministry.

Some will say that it is not possible to train church planters properly with this amount of material to be so quickly covered in just one week. Others will point to the efforts of some church planters in parts of the world today, succeeding with very little knowledge of God’s word, but being full of the Spirit of God and intentional evangelistic effort.

In Engage, we try to find the balance between giving our students a good foundation in God’s word in the capacity which is currently available to them, but also empowering them to go and commence serving. We believe that one of the best means of their continued growth will be their active service, and there they will be forced to come back and revisit the teaching they receive from us, as they use our resources to grow further themselves and also to teach it to others.