About

The Training Explained

The Tree of Life Training is designed to be a reproducible discipleship training that teaches all of the foundational, biblical doctrines necessary to make multiplying disciples and plant multiplying churches. The goal of this training is to produce trainers; i.e. individuals who will disciple other believers, while continuing to grow the Kingdom of God through evangelism.

One training is held each month.  During this training, one level, generally consisting of four individual lessons, is taught.  To maintain reproducibility, we strive to teach the lessons as simple as possible.  After each lesson, the trainees are spilt into pairs and asked to re-teach the lesson to each other.  Then one trainee is asked to re-teach the lesson to the class.  We stress that our trainings are a time of learning and practice, and we want the trainees to help each other by correcting any errors during the re-teaching of the lessons. It is important to re-teach the vision casting at the beginning of each training. This vision casting is found in Level One: Lesson One – “God’s Task for all believers.”

There are three main expectations for Tree of Life trainees.  Each month, we review these expectations as part of the accountability portion of the training.  The first expectation is to share the gospel with the lost.  In the training, the trainees are taught how to share their testimony, God’s story, and a one-verse gospel presentation.  Trainees should be encouraged to continue to practice this method of evangelism throughout the eight-month program.  At the beginning of each training, the trainees should report on their sharing from the past month.

The second expectation for the Tree of Life trainees is that they are training other believers each month.  There are four weeks between each monthly training.  We ask each trainee to re-teach one lesson per week to at least two believers outside of their Tree of Life group.  This task can be accomplished easily in one hour each week.  The trainees should use the T4T three-thirds format to re-teach other believers.  The three-thirds format is as follows:

The three thirds methodology of training others used by T4T

The last expectation for the Tree of Life trainees is that they seek to plant house churches through finding “good soil” people.  Trainees are trained to use their evangelism to find those people who God has prepared to hear the gospel message.  Once they find a “good soil” person, they should encourage this new believer to share the gospel within their sphere of influence.  The hope is to form a group of new believers through a “good soil” person.  The trainer is responsible to begin teaching the Tree of Life lessons to the new believer.  The goal is for these house groups to continue to grow and mature into healthy, reproducing house churches.

We ask that our trainees keep track of what God is doing through recording sheets.  These sheets allow us to capture where God is moving and serve as a diagnostic for any deficiencies in the training (i.e. many new believers but no baptisms indicates that we need to revise our teaching on baptism).  We also use these recording sheets to teach our trainees to differentiate between house groups and house churches.

At the end of the eight months of teaching, we hold a graduation service for the trainees.  A trainee must attend six out of eight meetings to graduate. 

After Tree of Life graduation

After our trainees have finished teaching the Tree of Life in their house groups, we have given them the sixty topical Bible lessons to continue studying in their groups.  These lessons are to be used with a participatory Bible study method, such as the SWORD method.  Our hope is that the addition of these lessons will reinforce each house group’s ability to study the Bible on its own and will allow for more time for leaders to be selected as the house groups move towards becoming a house churches.