Monday, September 08, 2008

DC 101 - Week 1 - Introduction

We started a new group this morning, made of 13 men, including the 2 co-leaders. We'll be spending the next 21 months going through a structured, self-led study called Thoroughly Equipped, a Discipleship Curriculum (DC). I want to try to blog through the entire course. During the 70 weeks of meetings, we'll memorize over 70 verses of Scripture, read through the entire Bible, and study and discuss a number of relevant topics from a Biblical perspective. The first week includes one memory verse, 13 chapters of Bible reading, an article on Scripture memorization, and 15 topical study questions on "The Character Traits of a Disciple of Jesus Christ." If we break down that work into 5 days of blogging, it might look something like this:

Monday - read Ephesians (6 chapters).
Tuesday - read Titus (3 chapters) and Proverbs 1-4 (4 chapters).
Wednesday - Memorize 2 Peter 3:18 - "But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be glory both now and forever. Amen." - and read the assigned article that reveals why we ought to memorize Scripture.
Thursday - Review memory verse and answer half of the questions (the 15 questions include all parts of questions 1-5 or so...).
Friday - Review memory verse and answer the other half of the questions.

This workload should be fairly evenly distributed among the five days of the week, with Wednesday having the lightest of the workloads and Thursday and Friday being heaviest, especially if you are not comfortable looking up Bible passages. Of course, it may be that a Sunday afternoon works best to pound out the vast majority of this work. That's fine too. Since it's a self-led study, you do what works for you; but the design is to build in some daily discipline into Christian growth. We ought to keep that in mind. Due to some travel this week, I won't blog daily on these tasks, but hopefully, starting next week, I'll be able to keep a daily record of a typical effort to complete this workload.