From Steve Shaffer, Director of Coaching and Discipleship.
A few months ago, Steve Allen, one of our church planters with The Table Irving, asked if Mission Alive could help train his volunteer team members. Since then, we began crafting a series of quarterly courses which combine fieldwork exercises with reading, discussions, and presentations. We are excited to offer these courses to our church plant teams, but also see great potential to use them as we work with existing churches who want to become more missional.
The Table Irving team completed its first course in May which focused on the core concepts of missional and incarnational living. The second course begins this month and focuses on the Good News. As we learn to participate in God’s mission, we need to have a deep understanding about God’s Good News for humanity. Too often, the gospel gets reduced to narrow ideas that use language such as sin, sacrifice, atonement, justification, and the like. This is insider, church language that is unfamiliar to the people we meet and serve on mission. Scripture uses a wide variety of images and analogies to describe the significance of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, so, in this course we will explore the variety of ways that Scripture describes what God accomplished in Christ, explore new ways to share the truth of God, and gain a deeper understanding of God’s love for his creation.
Your prayers for The Table Irving team and for the future use of this course are greatly appreciated.