I'm new. What next?

I was doodling around the Internet today, seeing what was around for helping new Christians to grow.

There were endless curricula. For example, and here, and a good looking one from the Nazarenes.

The one I really liked was not so much about a 'course', but about Christian life: mentoring as the cool crowd says these days, or basic ordinary everyday discipleship to we ordinary folk.

I was impressed with the suggestion to start a new believer in ministry as soon as possible. One learns and grows through exercise: faith is the same as sport in that respect. And like sport one gets better not by training alone, but by doing the sport. No good saying that you are a vigaro or croquet player and you only lift weights, but never get on the field!

However, there remains need for a structured course, maybe in layers, covering similar ground with increasing depth, as time goes by. The expectation being that a person with a profession and a degree, for instance, would seek and obtain a sophisticated understanding of their faith experience in a timely manner.

This does not usually happen and the church, to my knowledge, doesn't support this outside structured theological study. Very wrong. We should all be encouraged to know the life, practice and thought of faith in ever growing depth.

Most of us, however, are stuck at the kiddie stage and so cannot communicate faith with any credibility or confidence, not having a conceptual structure of life, faith and the world from the Bible, and so not being able to fit the gospel into life and make sense of it to others.