One of the more exciting and unexpected outcomes of the success of The Trellis and the Vine has been a kind of extended book tour that Col Marshall and I have been doing around the place for the last 18 months—running ‘Trellis and Vine’ workshops, talking to people about the ideas, interacting.
As Col and I have talked with pastors and leaders around the world, one very common issue emerges. Many are keen to begin to re-focus their congregational life on people and ‘vine work’ rather than structures and programs. But the first pressing question is: how can we spread this vision within our congregation? We may be keen to train everyone to be ‘disciple-making disciples’, but what if our people are not so keen? How can we get people to take their eyes off their small ambitions and their daily struggles, and catch the vision of being a disciple-making disciple in every aspect of their lives?
Ultimately, this is not a structural problem, nor one that can be solved by better programs or more impassioned appeals from the front. It’s a heart problem. It’s about what people passionately believe to be important. And therefore it is also a mind problem—since what we really love and long for is intimately connected with how we think about the world and ourselves, and what we think is important.
So we need to blow people’s minds with the wonder of God and the gospel, and to fire their hearts with a new love and joy and enthusiasm for serving Christ not only as a disciple but as a disciple who longs to make and grow other disciples. Simple.
But in reality, how does that kind of revolution happen? The Bible tells us it happens as the Spirit of God wields the word of God like a sword to change minds and transform hearts. If we want to see people change, we need to dig deeply and prayerfully into the Scriptures.
For the past 18 months or so, I’ve been working on doing that with a bunch of people, and seeing if a ministry resource might spring out of that which would help others to do the same. The result is The Course of Your Life.
The Course of Your Life is essentially a framework to help you apply the word of God to people’s lives prayerfully and intensively. The subtitle is ‘a personal revolution’, and that’s what the course seeks to do—to revolutionize hearts and minds by focusing on the central and profound issues of who God is, what he has done in Christ, what his extraordinary plans are for the world and for us, and how that generates a whole new agenda for the course of our lives: to be a disciple-making disciple of Jesus.
The course can be done as part of an ongoing small group, or with a bunch of people that you pull together specifically for the purpose. There are three integrated components:
1. The heart of the course is nine seminars that can be run weekly or fortnightly or in whatever format best suits your context. Each seminar consists basically of Bible study, prayer, discussion and some input to draw it together (either done by the course leader or by using the teaching segments provided on an accompanying DVD).
2. The second strand is a two-day intensive which happens towards the end of the course, which can either be run over a weekend, or over two consecutive Saturdays—or again, in whatever mode suits your people. The intensive pulls together all the material, and gives participants the chance to really think through what it means for each aspect of their lives.
3. The third component is one-to-one Bible reading. Over the duration of the course, participants get together in pairs to read through the book of Colossians, using a variety of one-to-one Bible reading methods. This not only reinforces and strengthens the content, but almost without them realizing it, the participants learn a basic and invaluable ministry skill—of being confident just to open up the Bible with someone else, and read and pray together.
In many ways, The Course of Your Life is like a sequel to The Trellis and the Vine. It takes the basic ministry philosophy and puts it into a framework and a format that can spread that idea to others in your congregation—not as a quick-fix course that you can put lots of people through hurriedly, but as a framework for teaching and training people in relationship, over time.
I think it’s probably the most important thing I’ve ever written. I hope you find it useful.
