S-Men-Understanding TUMI Category

In the Early Church, credential for leadership training involved comprehending and defending the elements in the Nicene Creed. As a matter of fact, this document served as a basic “bottom line” for orthodoxy in preparing candidates for ordination in the church. Not only can we appropriate the Creed in the same way for urban leaders, we can concentrate our theological training on the essentials of the faith itself. The Nicene Creed is our curricula’s critical foundation. It serves as our understanding of historic orthodoxy, and provides us with the content to create various syllabi for catechetical teaching in Christian belief and doctrine. We are convinced that a vital, spiritual understanding of the Nicene Creed can ground new believers in the faith, serve as a basis for doctrinal and theological education for the Church, and can be effectively integrated as a key component in our services of worship (liturgy). Furthermore, we believe the Nicene Creed provides us with the essential outline for doctrinal formation of the church’s leaders and undershepherds.

We offer the following documents to assist you in understanding the vitality and centrality of the Nicene Creed for both worship and leadership development.

• The Nicene Creed along with its biblical support Mastering this concise summary of the Story of God will empower leaders to better shepherd their churches and ministries. Memorize this summary to help you be able to defend its teachings biblically and theologically.
• “What is The Nicene Creed” is an introductory document detailing its history and importance in Church doctrine and gives you a theology for the Creed.
• Creedal Theology as a Blueprint For Discipleship and Leadership: A Time-tested Criterion for Equipping New Believers and Developing Indigenous Leaders explores how we can employ the Creed as a primary tool in equipping and credentialing leaders for ministry in the urban church.

Another way to familiarize yourself with the Nicene Creed is through song. Dr. Don Davis has written the Nicene Creed in hymnic form, adapting it metrically in both common meter and 8.7.8.7. We’ve included a list of tune possibilities for use with these lyrics. As you know, the hymn meter system is designed to any number of well known hymn melodies to various sets of hymn lyrics. With the Nicene Creed in hymn form, you can select well-known hymn melodies and sing together the faith of the Creed as a class, with your whole heart!

The Nicene Creed hymn – Common Meter
The Nicene Creed hymn – 8.7.8.7

The Christian Faith is anchored on the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, whose incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection forever changed the world. Between the years 100 and 500 C.E. those who believed in him grew from a small persecuted minority to a strong aggressive movement reaching far beyond the bounds of the Roman empire. The roots produced in this era gave us our canon (the Scriptures), our worship, and our conviction (the major creed is the Church, and the central tenets of the Faith, especially regarding the doctrine of the Trinity and Christ).

Capstone was created to help you equip your students to understand, embrace, and defend our shared common faith, i.e., our Sacred Roots. Once understood and embodied, then we can train them to defend and contextualize our common faith in their churches and ministries. Capstone can enable our students to ground new believers in this essential biblical story of their new-found faith, and show them how to instruct maturing Christians to deepen their faith on the solid foundation that Christ's story represents. Our desire is for you as Site Coordinator and Mentor to learn to show your students how they can benefit from hearing the story of Jesus told over and over again in the context of both private devotion and public worship. As you have treasured Christ and his salvation story for years, may he continue to transform you through it, deepening your own walk and revealing how you may fall in love with him afresh as you both retell and remember the Greatest Story ever told.

All of our courses can be applied to one or more of our Certificate or Diploma study programs:

• The Certificate in Christian Leadership Studies
• The Certificate in Urban Theological Studies or
• The Ministerial Studies Diploma.

In theology and worship, in discipleship and outreach, nothing is more important than knowing your spiritual legacy, the roots of your spiritual ancestry, the proverbial Rock out of which you were dug. In order to discern the origins of our own heritage, we need to do some spiritual genealogical work, as it were, to detect more precisely what constitutes the roots of our faith in Jesus Christ.

Today, the contemporary evangelical church finds itself impacted by and situated in an age of postmodernism, civil religion, hedonism, pragmatism, and ego-centrism. These cultural winds of compromise and change all (to some degree) have influenced the worship and service of the body of Christ in our various traditions and cultural expressions of our faith. These challenges call for a new discovery and appropriation of the faith once-for-all delivered to the people of God. To meet these threats and to take advantage of our present opportunities, we must seek to be transformed, renewed, and enlarged by the Christian Story in order to give truer witness to Christ and his Kingdom reign. Read more...

The Story of God: Our Sacred Roots