Vision

I believe God sees this course as a team gathered for God's Kingdom purposes, brought together for a season of transformation, growth, and multiplication through mutual training, challenge, equipping, and discipline in thought and action, all for new and lasting skill and fruitfulness in knowing God and serving God's mission and movement.

This course is structured so that its form aligns with its academic topic, which is the knowledge of God as Christians understand it to be revealed through lives of learning from, knowing, remaining in, obeying, and sharing the Father in the Son through the Holy Spirit within their inclusive and expanding fellowship of saints. The historical and cultural range of Christian practices that pursue this is vast, rich, and impossible even to survey adequately. The broad focus of this practical exercise in theology is narrower: a multiplication of disciple-making movements in which people across the world are coming to know God from vastly different backgrounds, in wildly different settings, and in history-making numbers. While on sabbatical I have been learning about these and passing on what I've learned, and that process will continue in our class.

"You are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers [and sisters]. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ" (Matthew 23:8–10 ESV). How well have we helped one another receive this word from our Lord? My role is not to be a conventional prof or expert teacher. It's to be a catalytic learner: a coach or a mentor within a chain of them that originates in Jesus Christ and his apostles and includes you and those whose lives you are shaping; a duckling following the line in front of me and with others behind; a mentor of mentors. And if you students are to learn theology that apprehends the Triune God in spirit and truth, then you must be apprentices, above all apprentices of Jesus, for "as the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you" (John 20:21 ESV), and "everyone when fully trained will be like his teacher" (Luke 6:40). So sharing theology calls us to learn how to learn and share all along the Lord's chain of duckling disciplemakers.

This course doubles as Senior Seminar (usually RS-180) for graduating seniors in Religious Studies for which it is a requirement. Senior Seminar class members may have additional responsibilities, at least informally. It also meets the General Education writing/oral communication requirement.