Servant Walk Update

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a video curriculum since I’ve been the Minister of Discipleship at Church of the Servant.  Each week, since I can’t teach more than one class at a time, I film a short video teaching on the scripture that Robert uses in the main service.  On Wednesdays a team of dedicated and devout folks come together to pour over the passage and listen to me teach a bit.  We then work together to see how we think God might be wanting to lead our congregation through our “simple” process of discipleship: believe, belong, and become.  On Thursdays, we post the video, and send out the compiled study guide to all the Sunday School leaders who are using the curriculum.

Out of curiosity, I went back and checked our curriculum print list from October 26th last year – my second week on the job.   We were printing 105 copies for the five classes using Servant Walk at that time.  This week we will be printing 305 copies for 12 different adult classes! 

I’m definitely getting to reap a harvest that I didn’t sow.  Others came up with this idea, and the lay team was already in place when I arrived.  In fact, my first official meeting as a new pastor here was to teach that group on my very first day!  Their hard work and vision is simply coming together in a way that’s making a big difference in our adult discipleship communities.

Working in a mega-church is very different in some ways from being in a small town two-point charge, but much of what you do is the same.  I still teach.  I still study Scripture.  In a huge congregation, one of the most important questions is finding out how to do little BIG.  This curriculum is simply a wonderful way to do the little things in a way that affects a much larger cross-section of the congregation.

Servant Walk Curriculum

Several folks have been asking me about the Servant Walk curriculum, so I thought I’d post one of the handouts we use each Sunday.  This link (OK, I’m working to fix this) should take you to a Google Doc version of the PDF that I send to each of our teacher/facilitators. OK, so Google Docs doesn’t support sharing PDFs yet, so I’m going to try to post pictures of the PDF at the end of this post. We also print out the curriculum for each of the classrooms.

Right now, we’re going through Bill Hybels’ “Just Walk Across the Room” as a congregation, so you will see references to his book here.

FYI – we have already shared this with a congregation in the Northwest Texas conference, and I dream about ways to make it avaliable, if they find it useful, with smaller congregations in other UM Churches.

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Servant Walk: Transformed by The Story

In case you’ve been wondering about this “video curriculum” thing, here’s the most recent example.  There is also a study guide each week that takes the lesson deeper and sometimes in different directions than the video, which almost serves as an icebreaker and jumping off point.  Anyway, this is the curriculum that up to 200 of our adults, from 20-90 years old, have been using in their Sunday School classes each week.  And yes, in case you’re wondering, this week I am teaching from a bathroom.