Center for Global Action : Course Offerings
Center for Global Action
Course Offerings
Spiritual Formation
Risk-Based Discipleship
Comfort can be a wonderful gift or, if life is built around it, can be toxic to our faith. To grow in faith, disciples of Jesus need to put their comfort at risk. This course will offer you a combination of training, practicums, and coaching to help you both grow as a disciple and as a discipler. We will seek to apply principles from Scripture to our lives as we do so. We’ll begin with a focus on God's voice and debriefing the lessons we’ve learned about our identity in Christ.
Spirit-led Living
Through a series of practicums, we will endeavor to more fully walk in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is our counselor and our intercessor. He empowers us to “do greater things” than Jesus did. He gives us gifts. Through him we produce the fruit of character and of transformed lives. We don’t walk in the Spirit by acquiring new book knowledge so much as by trusting him in new ways. We will give you opportunities to do just that through this course.
The Disciple Making Life
We will look closely at how Jesus raised up his disciples and we will try to apply that pattern to our lives. What kind of life did Jesus model for his disciples? How did he intend for them to live once he was gone? Jesus asked his disciples to go and do the same around the world. How has organized religion and modern society watered down that vision and complicated our efforts to follow our Lord? Through this course, we will try to walk out what it means to live radically in a comfortable and distracted world.
Community Living
Practicums
You will find three regular sources of community at the CGA: your cohort, your home community, and your ministry team. Each of these will afford us a rich context for applying scriptural principles to community living. We will continually challenge you in this course to live intentionally – to ask for feedback about how you are living out community. We will explore what it means to commit to community in a noncommittal culture. We’ll come to know and love those in our community and to function as a body. Regular debrief will facilitate learning.
Team Dynamics
At Adventures, we are continually forming and training teams. These groups give us hundreds of laboratories for studying and practicing our team-building skills. We will interact with program leaders to identify opportunities to grow in our ability to work with teams. Skills include: Leading effective meetings, selecting team members, conflict resolution, working as a team, and developing team norms.
Community-based Church
How do you find community in our fast-paced society? How does our independence-prizing culture get in the way of the practice of interdependence? If the old wineskin of church seems dysfunctional, then what is a model that does work? If we were to plant a church, what would it look like? We will seek to answer these questions in the context of community. As we plant churches around the world, we’ll seek God’s direction for what that should look like.
Kingdom
Partnerships (Scott Borg)
We will learn what makes certain partnerships effective and others fail. All cross-cultural missions efforts have partnership at their core. Yet the vast majority of partnerships end in failure. This course will help you understand and practice how to set up partnerships that honor and utilize both partners gifts to achieve mutually defined goals. We’ll learn the practices that help ensure partnerships continue to thrive and add life to both partners. We’ll draw on Adventures’ large database of thousands of partnerships. You’ll be assigned several partnerships to develop and manage to grow your understanding and skills.
Missions in the 21st Century
The world of missions has turned upside down in a generation. Whereas America used to send 90% of all missionaries, now countries like South Korea, India, Brazil, and China are experiencing great growth in the missionaries they send. What does that mean for America? What role do we have in bringing the Kingdom in this new epoch? We’ll use a series of cases to understand the big picture of what God is doing in the world.
Human Needs & Missional Living
What does it mean to live missionally? How do we establish the Kingdom of God wherever we find ourselves in life? In this course we’ll answer these questions in the context of exploring the felt needs of those to whom God has called us to minister to. We will study the ways in which unmet human needs are a gateway for the power of God to be displayed in planting the Kingdom. We will explore and debrief the multiple interactions we have with people every day that give us the chance to bring the Kingdom.
Understanding Your Call
Your Call: Practicums & Coaching
What did Jesus come to set you free from? What did he call you to do with your life? In this course, you will learn how to live a free and purpose-filled life – one that is unencumbered by the distractions that keep you from moving toward the call God has on your life. You’ll go through a series of coaching sessions where you identify and clarify your passions, skills, and plans. You’ll learn how to continue the process of clarifying God’s intent for your life as you walk out that call.
Life-Long Learning
The world of education has changed radically in just the last decade. Education costs used to be related to access to information. Now the trends of digitization, online access, and diffusion of information have driven the cost of information down to zero. The only barriers to life-long learning are our own curiosity and initiative. In this course, we’ll begin by assessing ourselves and then focus on designing the life we want to lead. We’ll use that as a platform to develop the habits that will serve us for the rest of our lives.
