We just launched Introducing Mormonism with Jana Reiss For Individuals and For Groups.

Many people outside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (usually called Mormons) have heard of Mormonism and know a little bit about it, but what is Mormonism really about? What is fact and what is fiction in terms of how the public understands Mormonism? How does Mormonism break down in terms of subcategories? What are the current challenges the Mormon church faces? Where and how is it looking to grow in the future?

In this course, Jana Riess, a leading authority on Mormonism, brings her extensive understanding of this faith tradition to help us understand the basic principles of Mormonism, as well as how it differs from traditional Christianity, although it is a Christian faith. She takes us on a journey exploring the diverse beliefs and practices of Mormonism, and the vibrant cultural expressions that have emerged from its followers.

Jana holds a Ph.D. in American religious history from Columbia University. She speaks often to media about issues pertaining to religion in America, and has been interviewed by the Associated Press, Time, Newsweek, People, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday, among other print publications, as well as Voice of America, The Today Show, MSNBC, and NPR’s All Things Considered, Tell Me More, and Talk of the Nation. She is the author or co-author of many books, including, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church, The Prayer Wheel, and Flunking Sainthood. She is a senior columnist for Religion News Service.

This course is ideal for anyone who would like to learn more about the basics of Mormon beliefs. For a course preview, please click below.

We just launched Keeping Your Daily Devotions Fresh with Peter Wallace For Individuals and For Groups.

If you live in Atlanta or enjoy the Day1 podcast and radio program from a distance, you know who Peter Wallace is. For those of you who don’t follow it, Day1 is a program that has been on the air since 1945 and presents preaching from outstanding preachers in mainline Protestant denominations. Peter is its executive director and has been hosting since 2001. He is the author of many books, including several on daily spirituality, and is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Atlanta.

If you want advice on daily spirituality, Peter is the person to ask. In this course, he gives advice about what to do to establish a practice of daily devotions — and to keep it going when it starts to feel rote or like an empty ritual, as happens to many worship practices over time.

Peter starts out by explaining why daily devotions are an important spiritual practice. We need to spend time with God, but we’re so busy and so overwhelmed with responsibilities and noise and people and businesses trying to snag our attention that we sometimes ignore the “still, small voice” of God speaking to us. At the same time, we recognize that something is missing. We want to spend time in the presence of God, even when we don’t realize that that’s what we need. That’s where a practice of daily devotions comes in — making a habit of setting aside time to listen to and focus on God. Peter also offers advice about what to include and reviews many resources to help us make our devotional time rich.

But what if the practice loses heart? Peter has many suggestions for how to handle it if you drop the habit and need to restart it or it starts to feel like an empty ritual. How do we keep it going? How do we ensure it retains meaning for us? That it truly is an experience of listening to God? This course offers dozens of suggestions for ways to handle that.

Peter’s course is ideal for anyone wishing to begin or refresh a habit of daily spiritual practice. For a course preview, please click below.

We just launched Putting Jesus’ Values to Work: Red-Letter Christianity 2 with Larry Stoess For Individuals and For Groups. This is the second of two Red-Letter Christianity classes — so called because Larry bases his ideas on the words of Jesus, which many bibles print in red letters. This class explores how we can live out Jesus’ values in our lives and in our communities. The first, related class, examines Jesus’ values in depth.

We hear ab

Chromotypograph of Jesus calling Peter the rock and foundation of his church. This file comes from Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom.

out Jesus’ invitation to follow him throughout our lives. But what does this great proposal really mean? The institution of the Church we have have created is most likely quite different from the path Jesus had in mind when he told Peter he would build his Church “on this rock.”

In this course, Larry Stoess takes us on a journey of of imaging how to put the values of Jesus’ to work in our communities so that we can truly follow him, living and loving as he taught us to among our neighbors. Larry calls us to enter into the mystery of the kingdom of God, into which Jesus invites us, a subject Larry knows well. He wrote the book Think Red, an examination of what a community would look like that truly based its choices on the actions and values of Jesus. Larry has lived into these values in his community in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the co-founder of Church of the Promise in Louisville’s Portland neighborhood, The Table Café, a pay-what-you-can community café, and Promise Housing Plus, a non-profit construction company that renovates abandoned homes to create housing opportunities for people in need.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the Little Prince, is often credited with offering a metaphor for how we can follow Jesus’ aspirational vision of the world as it should be, of the kingdom of God, available to us here and now and in the age to come: “If you really want to build ships, teach people to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” In this class, Larry talks about what we yearn for — what Jesus shows us about the vast and endless sea that is the Kingdom of God.

This course will interest anyone who would like to focus on Jesus’ vision and ministry as the gospel writers depict them and anyone interested in ideas on how to build communities based on Jesus’ ideas. For a preview, please click below.

Next week, we will launch Putting Jesus’ Values to Work: Red-Letter Christianity 2 with Larry Stoess For Individuals and For Groups. If you’re interested in analyzing Jesus’ work and ideas with a strict focus on what he says about them in the gospels, both this class and our other Red-Letter Christianity class (Jesus’ Values: Red-Letter Christianity 1 with Larry Stoess, available in both For Individuals and For Groups formats) are for you.

Part 1 of our two Red-Letter Christianity classes, launched last week, looks at Jesus’ words to determine what values were most important to him. Part 2 will talk about how he wanted his followers to enact these values in the world, in their communities. It talks about how Jesus’ values influenced his vision for the Kingdom of God on earth, and how that vision motivated his mission.

Larry Stoess is an author, community activist, and church planter. The main question he answers in this course is: having determined what Jesus’ values were, what did he want his followers to do with them?

This course will work best if you take Part 1 first, but you can take it as a stand-alone class since Larry does briefly recap his sense of what Jesus’ values were at the beginning of the course. For a course preview, please click below.

We have just launched Jesus’ Values: Red Letter Christianity 1 For Individuals and For Groups.

This class focuses on identifying what Jesus cared about  by studying his words in the gospels. Since these words are written in red in some bibles, we are calling this course a red-letter Christianity course. The course can be taken on its own or as part one of two. The second part, which will come out in two weeks, examines how Jesus wanted his followers to live out his values.

We speak of following the way of Jesus, but what exactly does that mean? Have you considered how radical Jesus’ values really are? Have you explored whether you and your community are truly living into them and engaging with them in concrete ways?

Larry Stoess has thought a lot about this subject. Larry wrote the book Think Red, an examination of what a community would look like that truly based its choices on the actions and values of Jesus. Larry has lived into these values in his community in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the co-founder of Church of the Promise in Louisville’s Portland neighborhood, The Table Café, a pay-what-you-can community café, and Promise Housing Plus, a non-profit construction company that renovates abandoned homes to create housing opportunities for people in need.

In this course, Larry takes us on a journey of examining Jesus’ values. While not complicated to understand, these values do not fit naturally into our culture. In many ways and contexts, from our societal structures to our personal choices, these values challege us every day of our lives. Larry’svideo lectures include:

• Relationships
• Downward Mobility and Human Dignity
• Radical Generosity
• Small Beginnings and New Beginnings

This course is ideal for those who want to engage with Jesus’ values in new and deeper ways. For a preview, please click below.

He said to him,“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22: 37-40).

The Rt. Rev. Mark Beckwith.

We just launched Seeing the Unseen: Lessons in Civil Discourse with Mark Beckwith For Individuals and For Groups.

Because we experience the world through the lens of individual brains and bodies, we humans sometimes have trouble sometimes understanding that other people are real. We get it intellectually, of course, but we sometimes fall into treating others as side characters in the main story (ours). If we are not careful, we can see others as relevant only in terms of how they interact with us.

Jesus spends a lot of time in the gospels trying to correct this mistake. He consistently demonstrates through word and action that no human being is a side character to God. God sees us each as important, and despite the limitations of our perspective, it is our job to see one another as God sees us. Poor people, obnoxious people, prisoners, mentally ill people, our enemies — God sees each of us as a main character. “Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus says (John 13:34-35). Jesus wants us to make an imaginative leap — to comprehend in our hearts as well as in our minds that each of us is fully human — and to interact accordingly.

In this course, retired bishop, author, and activist Mark Beckwith talks about ways to interact people whose humanity we tend to overlook. In the first lesson, he discusses interacting with people at a soup kitchen near his work and what it meant to really see them as humans equal in wisdom and experience to him. In the second lesson, he examines what this approach looks like in the context of mission work. In the third lesson, he talks about creates space for civil, respectful discourse with people whose beliefs differ from our own. In the fourth lesson, he uses gun safety as an example of how the civil discourse he teaches can play out in the real world.

Mark’s course is based on his 2022 book Seeing the Unseen: Beyond Prejudices, Paradigms and Party Lines

This course is ideal for anyone interested in learning how to bridge the divisions the various forces in our world raise between us. For a preview, please click below.

ChurchNext offers several certification programs for people who want to become well-versed in particular topics. For example, we already have a Certification in Vestry Leadership and a Certification in Prayer Book Studies. Today, we’re announcing a new focused area of study: a Certification in Episcopal Catechismal Study.

In this series of courses, participants become familiar with the topics covered in the Episcopal Catechism. At the end of this series, participants should be have a solid understanding of each section of the catechism. They should be able to open the prayer book to any section of the catechism and have a good sense of what beliefs and systems that section affirms.

Upon completion, either the individual taking the series or a mentor guiding their study may write hello@churchnext.tv and let us know you have completed your certification program. We will send your customized ChurchNext Certificate in Episcopal Catechismal Study.

Courses in this series include:

• Walk in Love 1: The Sacramental Journey For Individuals and For Groups.
• Walk in Love 3: Basic Beliefs For Individuals and For Groups.
• Walk in Love 4: The Church For Individuals and For Groups.
• Walk in Love 5: The Trinitarian Life For Individuals and For Groups
• Approaching Scripture with Vicki Garvey For Individuals and For Groups
• Creeds and Commitments with Jason Fout For Individuals and For Groups
• How to Pray with Christopher Martin For Individuals and For Groups
• Holy Communion 101 with James Hamilton For Individuals and For Groups
• Introducing Christian Baptism with Anne Kitsch For Individuals and For Groups

This series can be used in many ways

• It can help any Christian refresh their understanding of the basic tenets of the Episcopal approach to faith.
• It can help adults prepare for baptism.
• It can help young people prepare for confirmation.
• It can be a tool used in catechumenate programs.
• It can help new Episcopalians gain an understanding of our denomination’s approach to familiar Christian concepts.

Please note that all these courses are formatted for both individual and group study. They can, therefore, be adapted for use in many different contexts. Here are some examples:

• The For Groups courses can be the basis for group study, but they don’t have to be. You can combine them with other group activities.
• If a church is doing an in-person study series and someone has to miss a session, they can take a short online course on the topic — or even just relevant sections of a course — to keep up.
• Courses can be adapted for hybrid study programs in all sorts of ways — doing some classes at home and some in person, for example, or doing a program with at-home and in-person subgroups.
• The list could go on, but you get the idea. Be creative! These courses are adaptable tools.

Most of you already know that Lindsay Hardin Freeman is doing our free, live Good Book Club course: Examining Ruth and Esther starting this Wednesday, January 11. As of today, we have 333 people signed up to take it, and it should be extremely interesting. (If you haven’t signed up, we encourage you to do so. It will meet on six consecutive Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. E.T. starting this Wednesday. Click here to register.)

Since Lindsay will be doing this course with us, we thought it also would be a good time to update her course Let the Women Speak! For Individuals and For Groups. The course is based on her book Bible Women: All Their Words and Why They Matter, a second expanded edition of which is coming out on Feb. 1.

The women of the Bible lived in patriarchal cultures that granted them so little power that the men who ran their world regarded them as nonentities. Yet they blaze across the centuries in all their wisdom and pain, energy and intelligence, diplomacy and passion.

Tamar goes to creative lengths to deceive Judah into taking on responsibilities his sons neglected (Genesis 38).

Ruth declares that rather than abandoning her mother-in-law to despair and death, she will give up her citizenship and her place in the world to care for her — and she follows up on that promise with some serious risk-taking (The Book of Ruth).

The woman at the well has one of the lengthiest, most sophisticated conversations with Jesus of anyone in the gospels (John 4).

Joanna, Mary of Clopas, Mary Magdelene, and the other women gaze in astonishment on the empty tomb as the angels tell them Jesus has risen from death (John 19).

The women of the Bible act as powerful — and often surprising — agents of God. They influenced Christian history in powerful ways, and in this course you’ll begin to see how. Lindsay Hardin Freeman’s thoughtful, reverent, and intelligent presentations help these admirable and memorable figures come alive.

Our instructor, writer and Episcopal priest Lindsay Hardin Freeman (M.A., M.Div), has studied and written extensively on women in the Bible. She and her team of researchers were the first to count and profile all the women whose words are recorded in the Bible, resulting in the publication of Bible Women: All Their Words and Why They Matter (a second edition of which will be released in 2023). We hope you’ll find time to investigate her class on Bible women and what we can learn from them.

What Does “Updated” Mean?

Just as books with high-quality content need to be updated occasionally, some of our earlier courses do as well. When we relaunch a course, that means we have reviewed its video content and find that it remains strong and relevant, but the accompanying materials (introductions, discussion questions, supporting materials) could benefit from an update, either to remain consistent with what we’re doing now in terms of style or content or because references we made might have started to feel dated. When we find a good course that needs a little routine maintenance, we update it and re-launch it so you know it’s been reviewed and revised to remain current and helpful.

This course is ideal for anyone interested in women in the Bible or biblical study in general. For a course preview, please click below.

We just launched How to Be an Usher with Tim Spannaus For Individuals and For Groups.

The role of church usher marries hospitality with practicality. It is a ministry for people who want to welcome people and make the worship experience easy and pleasant for them, especially newcomers. Ushers are so useful that even before the position was formalized, the church had people appointed to various usher-like roles, facilitating worship and assisting people.

In this course, Tim Spannaus, Archdeacon at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul in Detroit, who has taught about the Episcopal liturgy for many years, teaches about best practices for ushers. He describes the role of ushers as, more than anything else, a role of hospitality, especially in relation to newcomers. Ushers are the first faces people who are new to a church often see, and it is their job to reach out to these people, answer their questions, and troubleshoot if necessary.

In this course, Tim talks about the biblical and historical role of church ushers. He describes the duties of an usher, and also discusses some of the extended duties ushers may expect to take on in their roles.

This course is ideal for anyone interested in serving as an usher or who wants to think about the role the ushers should take at their church. For a preview, please click below.