Abstract
Christian discipleship is the process of learning about the faith and living out the faith. This chapter reports on three items from the Church Times surveys that assessed different aspects of the discipleship process: learning about faith, growing in faith and explain faith to others. The introduction explains how discipleship, and especially education for discipleship, has been understood in the Church of England over the last decade or so, and how the Church understands the notion of sharing faith. The results indicate high levels of confidence in being able to explain faith, and that most participants felt they were growing in faith. There were slightly lower levels of welcoming opportunities to learn about faith and this had declined slightly between the two surveys.
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Notes
- 1.
The five items were: ‘I am growing in my Christian faith’; ‘I feel confident in explaining my faith to others’; ‘My Christian faith influences my important decisions in life’; ‘My Christian faith influences my attitude toward other people’; ‘Nowadays I feel closer to God than I used to’.
- 2.
For a sample of 2272 lay people, correlations with the number of different types of lay courses attended were as follows. ‘I would welcome opportunities to learn about the Christian faith’: r = .16, p < .001; ‘I am growing in my Christian faith’: r = .23, p < .001; ‘I feel confident at explaining my faith to other people’: r = .19, p < .001.
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Village, A. (2018). Discipleship. In: The Church of England in the First Decade of the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04528-9_8
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