Disciple!
Diploma in
Integrated Accompaniment for the Jesus Movement

The People’s Seminary is offering Disciple: Diploma in Integrated Accompaniment for the Jesus Movement beginning in February 2022. This training combines online live Zoom courses and self-paced online courses with small group meetings led by a trained facilitator, and includes required readings. 

The People’s Seminary seeks to integrate Word, Spirit & Street/justice perspectives.

Disciple! Diploma in Integrated Accompaniment for the Jesus Movement

Spiritual and psychological wholeness requires a multifaceted process of conversion, liberation, and discipleship. Jesus-followers who are called to accompany others in their spiritual journey need training that bring together perspectives and skills that are often separated. The People’s Seminary seeks to integrate Word, Spirit & Street/justice perspectives in raising up disciples, with a special focus on accompanying people often excluded due to addiction, poverty, mental health issues, trauma and incarceration.

Therapeutic approaches informed by psychology need to combine a working understanding of trauma, mental health, along with addiction and recovery. These must in turn be integrated with Biblically-informed, practical inner-healing and deliverance know-how. Contemplative prayer and early church wisdom need to be brought together with charismatic spirituality modeled by Jesus, including ongoing surrender to the Holy Spirit and practice of the gifts of the Spirit. Practical know-how on leading discipleship-oriented Bible studies and facilitating encounters with Jesus must be set in a larger framework of a biblical theology of the Kingdom of God. Global and social awareness are necessary to gain sensitivity to effectively bridge racial, cultural and social-class divisions. Personal prayer, study, worship, and intercession must go hand-in-hand with healthy lifestyle practices such as nutritional eating, exercise and rest.

Participants will learn to:

• Listen and attune themself to people pastorally, informed by diverse perspectives integrating discernment and prophetic insight, therapeutic/mental health, and trauma-informed understanding, inner healing, physical healing and spiritual freedom.

• Share the liberating Gospel of Jesus’ love and victory with humility and love, sensitive to the Holy Spirit and the individual.

• Accompany people seeking to growing to maturity in Christ, drawing appropriately from Scripture to nurture faith and liberating action.

• Minister holistically and cross-culturally, bridging racial and social-class divides.

Participants in this diploma can expect to become fluent in many core competencies that will be transferable into various missional and people-based environments.

The following core courses and practicums are required for the Disciple! Diploma: 

• Certificate in Transformational Ministry at the Margins, modules 1, 2, 3, Bob and Gracie Ekblad

• Therapy-informed Pastoral Accompaniment (GW5), Heidi Basely

• Trauma Transformation: An Exploration in trauma theory and holistic practical accompaniment, Heidi Basely

• Discipleship and Jesus Movement Building through Bible Study (GW1), Bob Ekblad

• Mental Health Challenges & Response: Therapeutic & Jesus-inspired healing (GW3), Heidi Basely 

• “Liberate!”: Jesus’ ministry of holistic liberation (1 & 2)- (GW6, 8) Gilles Boucomont

• Recovering: From brokenness & addiction to blessedness & community (GW4), Aaron White

• Basic Training for the Jesus Movement, (GW7), Bob Ekblad

• Hearing God’s Voice for Personal & Social Prophecy, (GW9), Mike Neelley and Bob and Gracie Ekblad

• Racial Injustice and Freedom from Systems of Oppression, Josiane Ngongang

• Drugs: the Illegal, Legal, Normalized, and Useful. An integrative discussion 

• Sex and Sexuality: the beautiful, awkward, taboo, and traumatic, Heidi Basely and panel

• Multiply: Becoming accompaniers of others in the development as agents of liberation

• Advanced Seminar.  Integrate! An adventure in the interweaving of skills and approaches

• Integrated Spiritual Accompaniment- Practicum—you receive

• Integrated Spiritual Accompaniment. Monthly supervised small-group practicum

Electives

• Healing for Personal and Social Change (GW2), Bob and Gracie Ekblad and Heidi Basely

• Listening for Good News in Trauma Texts, Bob Ekblad and Heidi Basely

• Self-Care for Physical Health

• Discerning the Times: Global Awareness & actions for peace, Jonathan Frerichs

Instructors

Bob and Gracie Ekblad are founders and pastors at Tierra Nueva, offering trainings locally and internationally through The People's Seminary. Bob has written books on reading Scripture with the excluded: such as Reading the Bible with the Damned, The Beautiful Gate: Enter Jesus' Global Liberation Movement, Guerrilla Gospel: Reading the Bible for Liberation in the Power of the Spirit, and Guerrilla Bible Studies, Volumes 1-2.

Heidi Basely is a survivor and activist in the field of trauma with twenty years of experience in clinical and missional contexts, pioneering and community building among traumatized people and mental health sufferers. She has lived and worked and practiced missional life among traumatized folk, the Roma and travelling community populations. She has born witness and cared for complex trauma sufferers in institutional care, after domestic violence, and reading the bible among those who suffer. Heidi trained in psychotherapy and counselling (BSc hons) and Integrative Therapy.

Josiane Ngongang teaches and bringing together guest speakers from diverse ethnicities and countries. Josiane  is a Christ follower seeking Jesus’ kingdom and justice in Paris. Originally from Cameroon, she has spent most of her adult live living in France. She works as a project manager for a French tech company. She’s been involved in youth ministry for the past 16 years. Currently she focuses on teaching, prayer and overseeing her local church life as a member of their group of elders.

Gilles Boucomont is a pastor of the Eglise Protestante Unie de Belleville (The United Protestant Church of Belleville) in Paris. Liberate! (in French Libérer!) is a teaching ministry founded by Pastor Boucomont in 2008 in Paris.This series of courses came out of a revival of the oldest French Reformed (Presbyterian equivalent) parish in Paris, in Le Marais-- near the famous Bastille. This church is a great granddaughter of the French reformer Jean Calvin who, along with Martin Luther, started the Protestant movement in the 16th century.

Aaron White is the National Director of 24-7 Prayer Canada. He has been a pastor, missioner, justice worker, and prayer instigator in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver for the past 17 years, where he lives with his wife and four children in a community home. He is the Resident Theologian at Jacob's Well, the Vancouver representative of the International Association for Refugees, and a teacher at the Westminster Theological Centre in the UK.  He is the co-author of Revolution and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Kingdom of God; co-creator of The Creative Way Down discipleship resource; and author of Recovering: From Brokenness and Addiction to Blessedness and Community. 

Jonathan Frerichs is Pax Christi International’s representative for disarmament at the United Nations in Geneva. He has served as a program executive and consultant for the World Council of Churches’ Commission of the Churches on International Affairs. He has worked as a reporter, writer, producer, teacher, trainer and executive for international, religious and civil society organizations—including Lutheran World Relief, Middle East Council of Churches, World Health Organization, Lutheran World Federation and Kristen Redio of Papua New Guinea. His professional experience is mostly in faith-based endeavors related to peace, human security, disarmament, development and the environment.