BOOKSTORE
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DISCIPLESHIP
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THE SPIRITUAL GROWTH PROCESS
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The Mission of The Church
The mission of The Church is: To authentically live out the great commandment and the great commission.
The Great Commandment (Mark 12:30-31) 1. You shall love the Lord Your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength. 2. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) 1. Stay until you are clothed with power from on high. 2. Go into all the world. 3. Preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins in Jesus name. 4. Baptizethose who believe the message … in the name of Jesus. 5. Teach those who have been baptized to observe all that Jesus commanded. We like to use the word mission because it implies that there is an on going process or journey taking place.This is true for every Christian.From the time that he is spiritually “born again” until his death, God is at work within a Christian transforming his life into the likeness of His Son Jesus Christ.We call that process … spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity is similar in many ways to the human maturity process that we all go through. It begins at birthand consists of learning and doingvarious things that give us the ability to work, play and reproduce ourselves.Jesus modeled this process by taking twelve ordinary people and then transforming them into individuals who were authentically living out the great commandment and the great commission in their lives. Spiritual maturity is predicated upon an individual’s relationship to our Lord Jesus Christ.That relationship begins by asking four basic questions. Who is Jesus Christ? What is His character? What is my relationship to Him? What is it He wants me to do? The answer to these questions are best discovered when people become familiar with the Gospels … as Jesus interacts with His disciples and issues them various instructions … moving them along a spiritual continuum. We are seeking men and women who earnestly desire to authentically live out the great commandment and great commission in their lives and are prepared to train and equip them to do it. The Spiritual Maturity Processwe use is based on what Jesus told His disciples to do.The training period designed to take an individual from his spiritual birth to adulthood; a state in which he is capable of making disciples of Jesus Christ himself. In designing the process we recognized that not everyone within a congregation is a new believer.In fact, many may have been Christians for some time. So we developed several training segments with entry and departure points to facilitate them obtaining only the training they needed to become fully equipped. The whole Spiritual maturity process takes about 120 hours to complete.The teachings themselves can be customized to an individual’s available time. (i.e. once a week for 3 hours for 40 weeks, etc) Each of the growth stages can be taught separately and conformed to the individual’s available time. Where an individual currently lies within the Spiritual Maturity Process and which step he needs to take next are determined primarily through self-evaluation. |