Discipleship
In the total team, the various agencies exercise complementary roles, as the Lord uses them to build up His local church.
A common strategy that is emerging to advance the Kingdom of God is culturally appropriate church planting movements. Rick Brown describes how different strategies have been used through missionary history (e.g. literature production, personal evangelism, church planting), but that these fail to reach full effectiveness if carried out in isolation. Now Great Commission organizations are working more towards a shared vision, a unified strategy. Using a farming analogy, he outlines key roles in the process of fostering church planting movements among unevangelized people groups. He goes on to summarize the benefits and obstacles to forming effective partnerships and lists core values held by many Great Commission agencies. [more...]
Following JESUS is a video-based discipleship series used to ground new believers in their faith. Using dramatized storytelling techniques and incorporating clips from the "JESUS" film, unique versions of Following JESUS teach biblical principles and demonstrate how to live as a follower of Christ in a new believer's heart culture.
The JESUS film Project is currently producing two distinct series for Africa and for South Asia. [more...]
Chronological Bible Storying (CBS) is the process of encountering God by telling the stories of the Bible. In CBS we tell Bible stories without interruption or comment and we tell them in the order that they happened in time. Afterward we discuss each story and its significance for our lives. Each story builds on those that came before; as a result, the overarching message of the Bible becomes clear and we discover our own place in God’s story.
This site (the sister site of Orality Strategies) is designed to provide the CBS resources you need in order to introduce people to the Christian message or to help existing Christians grow in their spiritual lives. The same basic process can be used to start new small groups or to plant churches. [more...]
Bible Storying is the intentional and uninterrupted sharing of God's Word primarily as stories. These stories are usually supplemented with culturally appropriate learning exercises that are listener sensitive. The stories may be told as part of a strategy of telling many stories leading to an invitation to believe, or may be only a few stories during an evangelistic encounter or a ministry opportunity.
This book is a manual for those wanting to get into Bible storying, including chapters on topics like: rationale for Bible storying, considering worldview, choosing Bible stories, crafting Bible stories for telling, pre-story dialog time, post-story dialog time.
The author describes the many options for presenting a Bible story and describes a model storying session. [more...]
When the Bible remains silent about certain cultural features, the Church... should assist the Christians to think through their traditions by digging deeper.
In the Tharaka society of Kenya, female circumcision has held a prominent place. In recent years Christian Tharaka people have questioned whether the rite should continue. The Bible Translation and Literacy agency has had a part in helping the society look at this rite from a biblical perspective. This article chronicles the history of the rite, including both its positive elements and problems, and some alternatives are presented. [more...]
The pastor will find that not only can his congregation read the Scriptures in their own language, but they will show a greater depth of understanding God’s Word and show growth in their Christian lives.
Community literacy projects have been running in Ghana since the 1970s. Pastors, however, were not using the mother-tongue Scriptures in their churches. To address this problem, Pat Herbert describes how they developed Scripture Guides to accompany literacy primers. The program is now known as Literacy for Life (LFL). The article includes a sample of a Scripture Guide lesson, and discusses various issues, including training of teachers to use the materials, making it a church-based program, and funding for the primers and Scripture Guides. It compares the normal literacy programs to the LFL program and describes the impact the program has had. [more...]
One of the primary benefits of BELT is that it provides an intensive experience in local language Scripture use, where reading, teaching and understanding the translated Scriptures is modeled and given high value.
The mission of BELT, a ministry of YWAM, is to partner with mission organizations (primarily Wycliffe Bible Translators) and indigenous churches to develop leaders through culturally relevant Bible training that teaches them to apply the Scriptures to every area of life and equips them to teach and influence others. [more...]
How can we start women reading their Bibles when they have never done it before?
Many women in Africa do not realize that the Bible has answers to their daily life questions. Hanni Gruenig describes how she used a course of Bible studies to address relevant issues for the women who had completed the literacy course. She describes its impact on some of them. [more...]
Downloadable resources, books and study guides for Bible study and Bible memory (the Topical Memory System).
Navigators invest their lives in people, coming alongside them one to one to study the Bible, develop a deepening prayer life, and memorize and apply Scripture.
An interdenominational, nonprofit organization, The Navigators is dedicated to helping people navigate spiritually, to know Christ and to make Him known as they look to Him and His Word to chart their lives.
Child Evangelism Fellowship® is a Bible-centered, worldwide organization composed of born-again believers whose purpose is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, disciple them in the Word of God and establish them in a Bible believing church for Christian living.