Outreach: Evangelism and Discipleship

Welcome to Equipping Beyond’s “Outreach: Evangelism and Discipleship” course!

This course is focused on Evangelism and Discipleship from a movements perspective, aiming to provide students with a deep understanding of what Movement theology is, its biblical basis, and how it works in the field. The course is designed to equip students with practical tools to create and sustain vibrant faith communities that turn into multi-generational and self-reproducing churches. By the course’s conclusion, students will be well-prepared to engage in Evangelism and Discipleship from a movements perspective.

The first lesson provides a theological foundation for the course. It starts with a look at the book of Acts and engages with the book “Acts and the Movement of God” by Steve Addison & Peyton Jones. This book pushes against North American stereotypes about evangelism (that it takes a long time!) and instead encourages us to believe that evangelism should turn into a movement that goes beyond the missionary’s one-on-one relationships. The second topic explores the principles that drive Church Planting Movements/Disciple Making Movements and provides testimonies of modern movements based on the book: “A Testimony for All Peoples” (published by 24:14 Now). The final topic in this lesson will respond to common critiques against the movement approach to mission by looking at the anti-movement book No Shortcut: A Manifesto for Modern Missions by Matt Rhodes.

The second lesson gets very practical by surveying popular tools used by field workers who practice movement missiology. The first topic covers Zume, an app designed to help small groups of believers who want to learn how to make disciples who multiply. The second topic looks at the Bible Discovery Method, originally developed by David L. Watson and Paul D. Watson, which teaches how to study the bible and apply it in any context. The third topic looks at T4T (Training for Trainers), a discipleship and movement approach that was very successful in China. This topic will require you to read some of the book: T4T: A Discipleship Re-Revolution.

The final lesson in this course dives into how media can be used to increase movements. The first topic starts with some critical reflections on why using media in evangelism can be problematic and will challenge you not to embrace the use of media without question. This topic will require you to read several essays from the book: Communication in Mission: Global Opportunities and Challenges. The second topic will highlight an organization called Kingdom.Training, that provide media training curriculum and other resources to utilize media for movements. The final topic will introduce software that is supported by Kingdom.Training called “Disciple.Tools“. This software is designed to help stimulate disciple-making movements and is well-supported by the missional movement community.

Course Format and Assessment:

There are three lessons in the course and three topics within each lesson. Each topic contains a discussion question that is set up in forum format. Please respond to each question in paragraph format and respond to others where appropriate. We want to cultivate a communal learning environment and If you respond to other’s answers, it is more likely they will do the same for you later on.

Each lesson is followed by a short quiz that will help you review the material. The quizzes will then culminate with an exam at the end of each course, which will combine the quizzes into one comprehensive review of the material for the course.

Time Commitment:

The time investment for each course may vary from person to person, but we estimate that if you read/watch all of the assigned material it will take somewhere between 10-20 hours per lesson and 30-60 hours to complete the course.

Potential Costs for Resources:

We have done our best, where possible, to only include books from the Scribd library. Of course, Scribd may choose to change the selection in their library at any time. When we cannot link to a book in Scribd we link to it in Amazon or some other source.