Discipleship School

Disciples of Jesus need to study God’s word. In that sense, they never leave school! It is all too easy to think that theology is just for the experts and that it is dry, boring and irrelevant. But have you ever considered that “theology” simply means “the study of God”? As Christians we are all theologians!

Although we have the greatest respect for missionary societies and Bible colleges, we want the local church to be the primary place where mission, fellowship, teaching and discipleship occur.

As for the importance of truth and doctrine we are fond of this well-known motto: “in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.”

With this in mind, NRC is currently developing an annual teaching cycle. Like a tree drawing nutrients from the rich soil beneath it, we want to draw life from God’s word.

We also want to be balanced in our teaching. There will always be a temptation to be distracted from the essentials but we want to keep the first things first.

That is why we have decided to cover a number of biblical themes through every year. The idea is that we will continually build each other up in the Word. We want NRC to be a permanent discipleship school. Sometimes you might be hardly aware of the current theme. At other times you will not be able to miss it, because the theme will be reinforced through a combination of books, preaches, CDs, web-links, home group discussions, book clubs and cluster seminars.

We like to think that any Christian topic you care to name can be brought under one of our five headings. As we start to create a database of teaching from internal NRC training and external sources, we will learn to become more effective disciples of Jesus.

We want to stay on track as Jesus’ followers and we want to avoid the spiritual immaturity which results from lack of study It is so sad when we impoverish ourselves by remaining at the Sunday school level and are “tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” and “the trickery of men” (Eph. 4:14).

The twelve themes are listed below. In practice they will be subdivided into innumerable subjects (e.g. “Christology” under the heading of “Theology”). This allows us to put a different angle on a familiar theme every year. Have you ever wondered about some of these questions? Well, now is your opportunity to tackle some of the most important issues in life...

12 THEMES

Trinity
1. Theology – who is God?

Bible
2. Bibliology – what is the Bible?
3. Overview – what are the overarching themes of the Bible?
4. Exegesis – can you help me study a Bible book?
5. Understanding – can you help me understand the Bible?

Kingdom of God
6. Kingdom – what is the Kingdom of God?
7. Church – what is the role of church within the Kingdom?
8. Discipleship – what is my role within the Kingdom?

Humanity
9. Anthropology – what does it mean to be human?
10. Apologetics – does my Christian faith make sense?

Time
11. Past – what does church history teach us?
12. Future – what will happen at the end of time?