What is The Equipped to Serve Program?
At Rogers Park Community Church our purpose is to be a place of Bringing people together in a relationship with God. Quite simply that means that we strive to be a church that is concerned with introducing people to a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and enabling people to go deeper in that relationship.
As a means of living out this purpose we have developed our REACH* strategy. A five point plan to fulfill the vision that God has entrusted to us.
The Equipped to Serve program is being designed to help us achieve the second of these five strategies Equipping people with God’s Word for the Christian life.
The program will use classes, seminars, workshops, missions trips and
various other formats in order to equip us with the tools necessary to
grow
in our relationship with God, and to live out our faith on a day to day
basis
in the homes, work places and communities where we live.
Courses will ordinarily be offered in one of 3 sessions throughout the
year
(Spring 1, Spring 2 and Fall) with each session lasting 6-8 weeks. We
hope to be able to offer a choice of 2-3 classes each session.
What Kind of Classes are offered?
Christian
Thought & Apologetics
• Reason to Believe: Why do we believe what we do? How can we explain our
faith to others? The
purpose of this class is to help us to learn to think about the faith
that we profess.
• Encountering Popular Culture: This class aims to help to equip us to
answer some of the
controversies and confusion in the popular culture of our society.
• Introduction to Church History: A survey of the history of the church
in order to learn from those
who have gone before us.
Biblical
Study & Theology
• How to Study the Bible for all it's worth: A class that will give us
the tools to help us to read and
understand the Bible.
• Knowing God: Examining the attributes of our great God, so that we can
know and understand
Him a little better.
• God's Plan for you, God's Plan for your church: A study through the book
of Ephesians which
helps us to understand our identity in Christ both as individuals and
as a body.
Counseling
• Helping those who hurt: How to listen to others and support our friends
through trials (in a way
that helps not hurts!)
Spiritual Development
•
Introduction to the Spiritual Disciplines: Prayer, Bible Study, Fasting,
Worship, Silence – what
they are and how to help make them a regular part of life.
• Effective Prayer: How to cultivate a deeper
and richer prayer life. This class includes both a study component and
a major emphasis on seeking the Lord through individual and corporate
prayer.
• Spiritual Gifts and Service: Every Christian
has God given gifts, which He has entrusted to us so
that we can serve the Church. This seminar will help you to discover
what your gifts are and how
you can put them to use.
Missions
• Encountering Other Faiths: An introductory to the major tenets of other
religions; their similarities
and differences to Christianity.
• Intro to Missions: What is Missions and why do we do it?
• Intro to Church Planting: What is Church Planting and why Rogers Park
Community Church is
committed to starting new churches.
…to prepare God’s
people for works of
service, so that the
body of Christ may
be built up until we
all reach unity in the
faith and in the
knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of
the fullness of Christ.
Ephesians 4:12-13