How can we engage in...
We want to build ralationships that last. Do you?
Do you want to invest to accomplish what really matters?
You are in charge of your spiritual growth.
We cannot make you grow.
We can guide you into a closer walk with God and
help you avoid wasting time in false ideas.
We can set up a plan,
a course of action that will
lead you more quickly to a clearer
understanding of God,
His purposes, and
your role.
Pursuit of truth and
your obedience to God
from what you learn
are up to you.
We want to give you the opportunities.
The commitment is yours to give.
First Steps
Thriving: Commit to Community
We need each other. God created us to relate well. Community is necessary for growth, encouragement, community, and opportunities. You get out of the community what you put in. You need people and other people need you. Come to give your personality, gifts, perspectives, and talents. You receive most when you give most.
Here’s the key to establishing a great community: You have to be there.
Regularly. Consistently. You need to commit to being there for yourself and for other people.
It’s going to cost you something but it will be worth it. Maybe more valuable than your education.
The more you do this, the more you will not want to miss being with your friends.
Pray
Prayer is talking to God. God hears those who believe Him; especially about Jesus. He is the center of every worthwhile endeavor. It’s His world. It’s His community. He is the main actor. He is the one who brings about spiritual growth and changes lives, bringing people into loving communities, leading toward an eternity of good things. If you have placed your faith in what Jesus did for you through His death, burial, and resurrection, God hears you. While He is not your puppet to accomplish your whims, He delights to hear your prayers. If you don’t know how to pray, we will teach you. There are many different kinds of prayer, but it’s all still just telling God what you think and letting Him reshape your thinking. We will pray with you and for you. You can pray alone. We will pray together in large or small groups. How to pray
Discipline
Discipline is self-control. It’s one of the evidences of God’s Spirit at work in you. You are the key factor in your spiritual growth and ability to lead. As you respond to God’s word and Spirit, you choose the things that are valuable to you in how you use your time. We will show you what you can do, provide opportunities, and gather a community where you may thrive, but you are in control of your personal development. We can help you learn disciplines. We can give you resources. We can connect you with accountability for habit development. However, you have to want it to get it. Change starts at the heart and is implemented by the will. We can encourage you, give you resources, provide community, and help you with opportunities, but the will to engage is all yours. Community is about letting us all help you with your “want to”. We’re not talking about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, but about learning to depend on the power of God’s Spirit within you to make the changes necessary to consistently walk in obedience to His written word.
Growth
Just like school, in spiritual growth, there are some things you must learn and do before other things can be learned and practiced. There is a framework of knowledge and obedience. If you are willing, we will walk together with you toward spiritual maturity. The ultimate goal is to know, follow, and act more like Jesus. We want to be equipped to be effective ambassadors who are guided by God’s written word and His Holy Spirit. Jesus is the triune God and therefore is our perfect example of goodness. Path He did not leave you alone. He placed His Holy Spirit inside each believer to guide us, saying, “this is the way, walk in it”. The Spirit of God uses the written Word of God to remind us of God’s truth. We then have the opportunity to believe it and submit to the truth in obedience. The main difference between a new believer and a maturing believer is the time between recognizing what God wants us to do and the time when we begin to obey God.
Because what God has already written is the key influence, probably the most effective way to grow is to begin memorizing Bible verses. The verses you memorize with be with you all of your life. When you memorize Bible passages, you invest toward a lifetime of rewards from a few minutes of work. Wherever you are, the word of God will be in you for the Holy Spirit to use in guiding you in each moment of every day. Memorize. (To get started, here is a good list verses to memorize. Start with one. When you know it well, move on to another.) See also Meditation.
Outreach
All Christians have this in common: Someone told us.
They told us that God loves us. Because God loved them, they told us.
The only reason we were able to believe God about Jesus is because someone made the effort to tell each of us about Him.
There is a chain of people like that leading all the way back to Jerusalem.
Some people were murdered for making the Bible available in our language. They knew their enemies, yet gave their lives because they believed that we needed to hear God’s word in our language.
Some were killed for telling other people the message of the Bible. If you heard God’s message, it came at great cost to someone, starting with Jesus Christ. They loved us. Now it is our privilege to share the message of eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ. It’s that valuable.
Do you know His value? Is His message valuable enough to you to share with other people?
Can you clearly communicate God’s message to someone else? If not, we’ll show you how. If so, let’s share Him with other people together!
Practical living
Here are some things we will help you address for practical living in college:
1. Devotional Life – How do you develop personal habits of prayer, Bible study, and other spiritual disciplines? Tips Where do you even start? A good daily devotional is a great place to start. There are 31 chapters in Proverbs. You might read each day the chapter corresponding to the date. There are 150 chapters in Psalms. On the first day of the month, read Psalms 1, 31, 61, 91, & 121. There’s an app for that “Psalms and Proverbs in 31 Days”. Other great plans are “My Utmost for His Highest” and “Morning and Evening”. See the BibleApp plans.
2. Personal Evangelism – We engage in the art of respectfully exploring other people’s spiritual interests while leading them to the truth we have learned about Jesus Christ. It’s not about getting people to agree with us. It’s about helping them discover the truth concerning the Bible’s claims about God’s identity and provision for our greatest need. How do we help people discover Jesus as their greatest treasure? What is the point of the Bible? How do we help people discover the truth about God’s identity, realize the worth of Jesus, and believe God’s written message? We will address surfacing misgivings and will be getting familiar with tools like the Knowing God Personally booklet. We will look at other resources. Tactics. Can we do some of this together and report back how God is working?
3. Discipleship – Disciple means learner, follower, or pupil; particularly a student of Jesus. Imagine being taught by the Creator of the universe! That’s the privilege that is ours. He has delegated this work primarily to other disciples while He also gives personal input. His key command is in Matthew 28:20, about teaching people to obey all that He commanded us.
**Under development.**
Several things to address: Assurance of salvation. (Who did the saving? When does eternal life end?) Learning to Grow. (Personal disciplines. Feeding yourself from the Bible. Knowing God. (Jeremiah 9:23-24, John 17:3) Listening to and obeying the Holy Spirit. (John 15, Galatians 5) Engaging in community with other believers. (Ephesians 4 & 5, 1 Corinthians 12) Dealing with sin. (Colossians 2:6, 1 John 1:9, 1 Cor. 10:13) The work of God’s Holy Spirit in our everyday lives. (John 14:15-26) Morality and purity. (Colossians 3)
Foundations for faith. (1 Corinthians 3) The art of helping others grow spiritually. What does a disciple-maker DO? Show some first steps on how to become a disciple (learner) who makes disciples (followers of Jesus). Options such as one-on-one Bible studies. Online video courses. Small group gatherings around resources. Mentoring and being mentored. Knowing where we are going – a path for growth. (Learn the Word. Share the Word. Show the Word. Teach the Word. Serve the World.) Getting acquainted with resources for real answers commonly asked by our peers. (truth-pursuit) Gaining the big picture. The Story That Matters, Bible introductory overview: By This Name, Video book: The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus, Knowledge: Interlocked.online. Discipleship: establishseries.com
(Other Resources: Discipleship, Ingredients, Community, Who&How, Tools.)
4. Spirit-Filled Living – God’s Spirit is the person who enlightens our hearts toward spiritual things in life. How do we learn to depend actively on the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit in everyday life? Again, not a comprehensive theology on the topic, but the basic, practical themes covered in the “Satisfied?” booklet
5. Leadership – How can I grow and learn about what it takes to be an effective ministry leader? How do you even run a leader’s meeting? Can you show me some things about how to lead a small group discussion? A focus group? A Bible study? Where are we going? Is there a path for discipleship and leadership? How do I address obstacles, conflicts, differing personalities, or things I just don’t know?
Steps for Growing in Faith
While all of us are accepted before God ONLY and completely by faith in Jesus Christ, there are stages of personal development in God’s design for our time this side of heaven. There are things that we do and think that are pleasing to Him and some that are not.
For all of us, there was a time when we did not know the identity of Jesus and what He did to make us acceptable to God. When we did realize our desperate need for a Savior, we were not immediately qualified or capable to fulfill roles as the senior leadership of a local church. There were too many things we did not know and too many habits that were not pleasing to God and other people. There are Biblical qualifications for leaders. A lot of those qualifications take time and practice to develop in our lives.
We are not talking here about coming to a place where a person “has arrived” but about growing individually to be more and more like Jesus Christ in the way that we think, act, and lead other people. God has a purpose for our lives that requires that we grow beyond spiritual infancy so that we are more useful to Him in His objectives in the way we live and what we know. We are His ambassadors in the world and He wants to be represented in ways that are good and kind.
Before a person can become a Biblically qualified church leader, that person must bo born again, born of the Spirit of God by faith in the work of Jesus Christ through His death, burial, and resurrection.
Most of us need more information about the identity and work of Jesus Christ before we can place our trust in Him. That’s the work of Pre-evangelism. In Pre-Evangelism we give people the information they need to make an informed choice about trusing in Jesus Christ.
The work of evangelism is about giving people the opportunity to respond in faith to what they have learned about Jesus Christ.
Once a person has placed their faith in Jesus Christ, there are a lot of things that God wants them to know. Teaching Christian foundations through discipleship equips believers to live the rest of their lives in power and security of their identity and position in Christ. Perfect love casts out fear.
Beyond learning about our identity and position in Christ we come to realize that God’s plan involve our active faith in His word through Christ-centered living. We are not our own. We have be bought. God has work for us to do.
As we grow in our Christ-centered living we realize more and more that God has prepared good works for each of us to do. We learn to actively engage in ministry outreach to other people, leading them to faith, facilitating their spirtual growth, providing opportunitiest to serve, and equipping them with the tools they need to follow in our example as we follow Christ.
Everybody leads someone in some way. Paul told Timothy to commit the things that he had learned to faithful men who will teach others also. Likewise, we are to lead other people to lead.
Since the willingness of our hearts to learn and our eagerness to obey God in all things are key factors in spiritual growth, even very young people can quickly grow to spiritual maturity.
For all of us, there are certain things that need to be learned before other things can be practical realities our our lives. The chart in red above shows the progression toward spiritual fruitfulness as revealed in 2 Peter 1:1-11.
For example, after clearly understanding the Gospel of God’s grace and applying it to yourself by faith in God’s word, there may be some habits that don’t line up with obedience to God’s design for you. That’s where virtue, or moral excellence come in. As you add virtue to the way you live, more things that are unlike God’s character will become apparent to you. That’s where knowledge comes in. How can you do what is right in obedience if you’ve never heard God’s plan or read God’s book, The Holy Bible? Once we know what is right, then we have the opportunity to add self-control, or temperance, to do what is right. After that we begin to learn to do what is right when things are not working the way we want or when other people get in our way. That’s patience or perseverance.
Active Discipleship
Intentional, mentoring discipleship is God’s design for believers to learn obedience. Matthew 28:20
“Just read your Bible!” Some people tell us. “That’s the fastest way to grow in faith.”
While the Holy Spirit is faithful to teach us through exposure to His written Word and obedience to what we know, self-study is not the only pattern we see in Scripture. 2 Timothy 2:2, 2 Peter 1:3-11
Let’s say that you want to learn to repair HVAC systems. You can learn a lot online, buy some manuals, and visit the library to learn. You might buy old machines to dissassemble and rebuild. But you might never encounter instructional knowledge about the dangers of high pressure systems, the basics of how the systems work, differing methods of compression and expansion, the design of components which transfer heat, or the advantages and disadvantages of the gases and liquids used in differing systems. You might spend years learning to repair the systems without ever learning how they work and why. But a short time of intentional instruction from an experience HVAC educator may have you up and running effectively in a relatively short time with the knowledge and tools to safely build and repair HVAC systems.
Many Christians stumble through their lives without purpose because they were never discipled. It really helps to know what God is doing and our purpose here on earth. It helps to know the Bible as the story of God’s glory and be taught through it skillfully so that disciples are equipped to disciple other people. If God gave very specific instructions for building the Tabernacle and the Temple, would He not also have a design for building His Church? 1 Corinthians 3:8-17, 2 Timothy 2:2
Next Steps
Following the patterns above, we have selected some key resources that we believe will be most helpful in walking to people toward spiritual maturity in Christ. While there are many resources available, we have chosen these resources because of the Apostle Paul’s admonition to be careful how we build. 1 Corinthians 3:8-14
- Establish 101 – establishseries.com – (Completion progress chart – click here.)
The Establish Series is the most effective for establishing faith in the identity, person, and work of Jesus Christ. Most other materials do not lay this foundation or, if so, do it in very roundabout way. Jesus Christ is the why behind the what. The Establish series is the most effective in laying a solid foundation for Christian growth, maturity, and service. It is based on the resources Ethnos360 has been using for five decades to establish thriving churches among isolated unreached people groups all over the world. It’s not a substitute for teaching the word of God. It is an outline for teaching God’s word following the pattern that He has used throughout history to reveal Himself to the world. Upon successful completion of Establish 101, we recommend continuing on with Establish 102. People in any culture need the same foundational information about God so that God’s rightful place as worthy to be worshiped is clearly understood. In generations past, people in western societies had this information because the judeo-christian culture was Biblically literate. Today that is no longer true. We need to lay the foundations of God’s character, person, purpose, plan, and people so that faith is placed in the only object of faith Who is able to save us.
- Why We Teach Chronologically – https://vimeo.com/1075944996
- Foundations, Basis, & Other Resources – https://stilluntold.org/basis/#foundations
- More Than A Carpenter by Josh McDowell – This resource helps students understand that the Bible is a reliable source for information.
- The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus by John R. Cross – John gives a high level overview of the Bible from Genesis to the life of Christ showing the central themes of the Bible. This is great from people with a Judeo-Christian worldview. For students of other worldviews, we make these resources available. https://goodseed.com/tool-selector.html
When the foundations of the Gospel have been established, we may move through a series of Bible lessons we call “Bible Essentials” or one of these resources.
- Design for Discipleship by Navigators
- I’m Saved Now What?: The Basics of Christian Living by Grace by Dennis Rokser – https://a.co/d/6U778GB
- What I Want to Do, I Don’t Do…: I’m Saved But Struggling With Sin. Is Victory Available? Romans 6–8 – by Denns Rokser – https://a.co/d/fqERitR
Other Resources
Starting. I’m just beginning to learn about Christianity, Cru, etc. Where do I start?
– New Life In Christ – https://athletesinaction.org/foundations/your-new-life-in-christ/
– What is the Good News?
– The Greatest Message!
– Intro to Missions
Acceleration. I know a little bit about faith and growth. How do I step on the accelerator?
– What is the Big Picture?
Thriving. Want to help establish a large, thriving ministry on campus? Whether starting, rejuvenating, or picking up the reins from a previous generation, here are some key questions and answers…
– https://www.cru.org/us/en/train-and-grow/leadership-training/starting-a-ministry/start.html
Discipleship – Being Followers of Jesus – Mentors
– https://www.cru.org/us/en/communities/campus/top-tools-for-transferable-training/discipleship.html
– https://www.navigators.org/disciplemaking
Being Leaders – Being a leader is seeing a need and stepping up to do something about it. – Everybody leads somebody sometime in their lives. Do you want to start early or late?
– Tools – https://www.cru.org/us/en/communities/campus/top-tools-for-transferable-training/more-training-tools.html
– Primer on Discipleship – https://www.cru.org/content/dam/cru/legacy/2012/01/aprimerondiscipleship1.pdf
– Leading Small Groups – https://www.cru.org/us/en/train-and-grow/help-others-grow/leading-small-groups.html