Teaching Lay Leaders will be a function of our church.
Faith in Action serves as a teaching church for those who visit us, as well as serves to assist other churches in what a teaching church should look like.
Read about our plans to develop a Home Mission Program for teaching those who know little or nothing about Jesus and the Gospel.
Step One: History of Christianity Classes
Understanding the history of the church is critically important in our world today.
The apostles and disciples learned from Jesus and after the resurrection the disciples learned from the apostles. Early church leadership was trained to teach.
Today Bible illiteracy is everywhere. Knowledge of the history of Christianity is rare. Even on the seminary level the amount of focus on the churches history is minimal.
The development of church doctrine, the writing of the creeds that we say we affirm, requires an awareness of the history that developed these essential parts of the church. To fully grasp doctrine, one needs to lay hold of the history that formulated the development of that doctrine. The doctrine of the trinity and its development is an important example of this.
Step Two: In Depth Bible Studies
An in-depth Bible study program including all 66 books of the Bible.
Step Three: Discipleship
Step Four: Become a Subscriber to Faith in Action
Benefits
- Join Faith In Action Lutheran Church Friends of the Missouri Synod Group
- Promote your research and writings online with Faith in Action Lutheran Church.
Home Mission Program
Faith In Action Lutheran Church seeks to develop a Home Mission Program to reach out to those that know little or nothing about Jesus. This is part of our purpose as a Teaching Church.
In a far off country of Chad in Africa a missionary couple (named below) has devoted their lives to growing and training Missionaries to reach out to their people. The results have been impressive. We wanted you to see their approach, to understand what we are wanting to emulate in our own Home Mission Program.
Little Messengers of Jesus
Jesus is the missionary sent from God. How did he enter this world to accomplish his mission? He humbled himself, joining himself to our humanity, embedding himself into our existence by way of a simple, hidden and devout family and community life.
During this “hidden life”—in Bethlehem, Egypt, and in Nazareth—the Son clothed himself in love with lowliness and precarity, as one seemingly unimportant, receiving a spiritual, intellectual and social education in the midst of common people. He followed a plain path that possessed a divine pedagogy, the Holy Spirit shaping him in view of later, more public ministry. In this hidden pathway the kingdom of God was already present. Twice Luke writes: He grew in wisdom and in grace with God and before people (2:40, 52).
In like fashion, when Jesus later called his apostles, he desired that they first be “with him” (Mk. 3:14). They would spend time together in a spiritual and instructional environment, like members of his family (Mk. 3:33-35). Jesus was their model of the balanced life of a servant of God, one that oscillates between activity and solitude, at times with others and then again alone with God (Mk. 1:35; 6:46; 14:32). This education of the Twelve was so they could be sent out just as Jesus was sent (Jn. 20:21).
It is only reasonable, therefore, that the Church today consider the early training of Jesus, and the similar way he prepared his apostles, as a pattern for preparing missionaries today. For Jesus is the mission of God—the states of his life unveil the ways the Father operates the grace of the Spirit in the humanity of the Son to accomplish his plan of salvation for the peoples. Since the acts, words, and dispositions of Christ’s earthly life express the eternal Word in flesh, they are thus themselves eternal: “The redemptive activity [of Jesus] is not a historic memory, but a reality for today” (Bremond). Consequently, the grace revealed in the varied aspects of Jesus’ life is ever present for faith; they are employed like molds in the hands of the Holy Spirit who sculpts the members of Christ’s body to the contours of Jesus’ life and mission.
Just so, a missionary training community in Chad, Africa is pursuing a pathway of education that seeks to be shaped by the grace manifest at Nazareth: a life together in simplicity and spiritual growth in knowledge and wisdom. In a hidden place, we seek to be made little, like Jesus, to listen from the heart to Scripture and pray it, to learn to love our neighbors, their culture and language, and to deepen our understanding of theology and mission work. All of this we do, like Jesus, in a context of family and community life, of simple labor and friendships among unreached people. Through this experience we pray that each person will offer themselves better fitted for service in the mission of God.
Therefore, this community exists so that
1) the new convert can find a place of instruction (be discipled);
2) the seasoned Christian worker and his family can find further training; 3) the expatriate missionary can find continuing education, and that
4) the Gospel be communicated through friendships with neighbors.
Our common life is built upon…
Prayer (daily office, worship services, spiritual accompaniment/retreats),
Word (biblical, doctrinal and spiritual readings and discussions),
Repentance (continual conversion and renewal in light of the Word), and
Work (common life/labor, friendship and loving witness, 1 Pt. 3:15).
If the Lord doesn’t build the house, the builders labor in vain. Ps. 127:1
Paul and Teresa Szobody, missionaries