Discipleship: 40 Days of Discipleship: A Self-Paced Doctrinal Instruction Plan

We recommend that church leaders pursue formal education that gives both breadth and depth.[1] However, formal education is not practical for everyone. We recommend here a plan by which a person might use free resources from the GCI website to guide them in their education.

There are two important components of this list: 1) prioritization and 2) breadth.

1. Prioritization: Our website has more than 1000 articles, and it can be difficult to know where to start. Of these articles, which are the most important? We try to provide some guidance on that by putting them into three groups. These are not necessarily levels of difficulty (most of our articles are from publications aimed at a lay audience), but provide some guidance about how to spread the reading out.
   Since most of the articles on our website were previously published in our denominational magazines, you may have read these articles before. Nevertheless, do not assume that you know what is in them! Almost all of our website articles have been edited within the last four years, to remove phrasings we now realize to be erroneous, and in some cases, to add insights we’ve had more recently. (Some of the articles were originally published 20 years ago, and some have been extensively revised to bring them up to date with our current theological understanding.)
2. Breadth: Do not study only the topics that already interest you. You (and the members of your church) need exposure to other important topics. Try to read all articles in group 1, in all subject areas, before you proceed to group 2. We have attempted to give breadth in each sequence, with about the same amount of reading in each area. We have grouped the articles into 2000-3000 words for each day. If you read about 15-20 minutes per day, you’ll be done in 40 days. Some people might want to go faster, others slower. Since you set your own pace, you will need some self-discipline to continue the journey.

For a PDF containing all the articles in one document, click here. If you want a paperback printed copy, you can obtain one for $5.00 from Amazon in the U.S. or Europe. In the U.S., spiralbound copies can be obtained from thebookpatch.com for $10.36. The first 20 days have been translated into Portuguese.

For the second group of 40 days, click here.

GCI articles organized by doctrine, with links to the GCI website

Group 1: The first 40 days