Welcome to the Faithful Presence Course

The church is in an age of resurgence of mission. This is it to say that the church before our current time completely lost focus on doing justice in pursuing mission, there has always been a small remnant of people throughout the history of the church that have preserved the mandate to reach the lost and care for the poor. But it is undeniable that we dramatically strayed from this over arching narrative in recent generations. For generations the church was losing steam as this way of embodied faith was one of the main contributors to the church being a beacon of grace and hope to a dying world. Fortunately, this language of doing justice and being missional is being rekindled and reconsidered.

As we begin to get back to our roots, we need to reconsider what this call upon the Christians life looks like in our current context. In other words, we need to re-contextualize this calling. There is no longer a lack of books that offers us some ideas and insights as to how we can go about being missional. Some of these books are great, but they only offer a theory or theology and are not proposed by practitioners, leaving a ideal in place but setting up the missionary for a toil some road ahead. We need a model that bounces the theory and practice, something with a curriculum and a practicum.

David Fitch his most recent book, faithful presence, offers us an extremely insightful way of mobilizing our missional communities to be just that, missional communities. Fitch lays out principles that have been lost, forgotten, or ignored by protestants over the past several hundred years and applies those principles to patterns he sees all throughout the Bible, presenting a very simple yet powerful way of engaging the world and participating with God to change it.

This course is meant to be a supplement to Fitch's new book. If you want to take this course seriously and get the most out of it you will need to purchase the book and read along with each class. The lectures that follow are not exhaustive on the material, but supplemental to the book. To really absorb the following concepts you will need to oscillate between reading the book and watching the videos. Click the picture below to purchase your book and get started.

Once you have your book you can start the first lecture. Each lecture will tell you which chapter to read as you make your way through the course