It took us 2,000 years, but we made it

The Church of England has just published a new discipleship resource, roughly 2 millennia after Jesus made discipleship the top priority for his followers after his resurrection. This is, apparently, the first discipleship course ever commissioned by the bishops of the CofE. It's a recognition, perhaps, that the standard Anglican practices of attending worship and hearing the same 3-year cycle of readings repeatedly preached doesn't do the job of making disciples.

I've ordered the introductory pack and it'll be interesting to see what approaches it uses. Having something which both forms and informs is vital - I've experienced 'discipleship' courses which fill the head with knowledge and assume the heart will follow.

Here's an overview of the 8 sections of the course, there's some good quality people involved, and it looks to be booklet based (rather than presentation or DVD based). That's a plus in places without the computer literacy or hardware, but a minus in other ways. There are some audio and video files to go with the sessions, which hopefully come on a DVD with the booklets.. More when my parcel arrives! In the meantime there are some pdf sample sessions. I do like the way the session is set up, good mixture of input, reflection, discussion and spiritual exercises.

This looks very handy

London Institute for Contemporary Christianity have a very useful review of 13 discipleship courses. There is a 1-page overview based on presentation, ease of use, and application to whole life discipleship, as well as a more detailed review of each course. It covers Emmaus, A Life Worth Living (the Alpha sequel) Purpose Driven Life and all sorts of others.

The review dates from 2005, so I don't know if it's just been posted, or whether I'm even later than I usually am.

Really useful to have this all together in one place. Ht to the Diocese of Bath and Wells website, which seems to be emerging from its long slumber and has a few interesting new things on it.