Learn With Us: Announcing the First-Ever Forge Curriculum!
I’m going to state the obvious: our nation has a crisis of leadership. We stand in desperate need of citizens who can think, serve, and lead well.
This is why we are thrilled to announce a new key resource in how we raise up our faithful, effective servant leaders: our first-ever Forge Curriculum. The Civil Society Tutorial was developed by Forge Board members and friends to help our students (and all citizens!) understand and apply biblical truth and American principles of self-governance to live and lead in our 21st-century context.
I’m excited to formally introduce you to the Forge Mentorship Academy yearly curriculum: UnCommon Sense and the Civil Society Tutorial.
Over the next several months, the Forge Academy will learn together as they read, work through, and discuss four short booklets that together make up UnCommon Sense and the Civil Society Tutorial Project:
1. Good Citizens: A Guide to Dual Citizenship for Disciples of Christ
2. Build Character: Leadership Character Ethics
3. Build Collaboration: Character-Based Collaboration
4. Build Community: The Goal of Civil Society
At the end of it, I believe they will have a phenomenal experience that helps them understand their identity and responsibility as “dual citizens” (citizens of Heaven and of our American republic) and helps them reflect on and grow into the character-centered collaborative leader that it takes to build true American community.
Learners will encounter over 50 biblical passage references and engage the full text of five crucial American founding documents: the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Gettysburg Address.
The 2021-2022 Class is the inaugural Forge Mentorship Academy Class to receive this incredible training! As I shared with them, it has been a labor of love by some truly brilliant members of the Forge Family. This series was created and authored by Forge Board Member Chip Weiant and edited and re-published by Forge Board Member Michael Hamilton. Further, one of Chip’s original co-practitioners of this curriculum is Dr. Monty Lobb, who will serve as the lead instructor/lecturer on our monthly Zoom classes.
Michael was kind enough to write a special Forward for our students:
“‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’ wrote Thomas Paine, the author of The American Crisis and of Common Sense. These writings from the revolutionary period exerted an undeniable force on the colonial mind as Americans recalculated their allegiance to God, community, and country. Unfortunately, the trial of souls and of families, of neighborhoods and of nations, recurs generationally. This is because though human beings were created to do good, and government was given to man to uphold the good, both trend evil unless vigilantly checked and replenished by citizens of conscience.
The Civil Society Tutorial presents a series of tools for molding such citizens into virtuous civic leaders. Alternating instruction, assessment, and discussion starters guide readers to understand first that the virtue our republic requires is defined by the biblical God. Therefore, good citizens and godly citizenship track together. A relationship with this God should result in a rightly ordered soul, or, in other words, build character, the bedrock of every free civilization. When people of character learn to build collaboration, they liberate and equip each other to build community, which is the goal of civil society.
We challenge you to critically evaluate yourself through the lenses this tutorial offers, that you may see personal and civic self-governance for all it is worth–as a true, good, and beautiful, and attainable aspiration of God’s noblest creatures.”
We hope you will enjoy growing with us and getting to see a portion of the excellent training you make possible through supporting Forge. Because of you, young people are better equipped to serve our God, our country, and our neighbors.
