Ten hours. Five weeks. One cohort.
The official participant's book is built in five sessions, which map cleanly onto ten contact hours. Two in-person Saturday bookends carry the community; three Zoom evenings in between carry the participation.
Matches the official curriculum, session for session.
- 1
Ministry of the Baptized
Welcome and covenant, then the priesthood of all believers — hearing and discerning God’s call, spiritual gifts, and the place of laity in early Methodism.
- 2
Leading
Servant leadership, spiritual leadership, Christian conferencing, and how a group reaches consensus and discernment together.
- 3
Caring
The biblical basis for caring ministry, acts of compassion versus acts of justice, the range of caring ministries, and care for creation.
- 4
Communicating
Respectful communication, mutual invitation, real listening, and how to tell your own faith story without a script.
- 5
Into the World
The Great Commission, hospitality, and tools for ongoing ministry — plus a dedicated conversation on the three doors this course opens: local leadership, pulpit supply, and starting new faith communities. Closes with commissioning and next steps.
Four pastors, one cohort, no one overloaded.
A course dean convenes Week 1 and co-leads Week 5, and handles registration and the district liaison. Three other pastors each take one Zoom evening — roughly two to three hours of total commitment apiece, including attendance. All four join the Week 5 closing panel.
The team model keeps the ask to any one colleague genuinely small — one evening plus a Saturday — and makes the course connectional rather than congregational: each pastor recruits three to five laity from their own charge, yielding a cohort of twelve to twenty that models the connection the course itself teaches.
The official curriculum, unaltered.
This project doesn't change the required curriculum (¶266.7) — the Lay Servant Ministries Basic Course Participant's Book (Jackson & Jackson, Discipleship Resources) carries the content for every session. What this site and its companion materials add is context: primary-source readings, a plain-English map of the certification ladder, and the logistics to make a hybrid, team-taught cohort easy to run.
Completion is reported to the district committee on Lay Servant Ministries (or equivalent structure per ¶668.3) so it counts toward certification as a lay servant.