e-Newsletter - Volume 6, Number 4
Registration Is Open For "Stewardship and Culture: Building Contagious Generosity" 
by Bill Anderton

Registration is open for our first course in 2016. This is a five-week course and its Virtual Classroom is available for an immediate start. Start the new year by working on stewardship planning for your church!

The course begins next week, but register today and you will be able to participate in a one-hour introductory audio conference call with Betsy Schwarzentraub, the course instructor, that will begin tonight at 7pm Central Time.

Because transformative stewardship includes understanding of our culture, the "Stewardship and Culture: Building Contagious Generosity" course will explore how our culture influences faithful stewardship and generous giving. Students will be able to frame insightful critical questions about consumerism, embrace God’s vision of sufficiency, recognize the additional impact of technology on consumerism, and begin to create a Generosity Plan for their congregation.

Click here for more information.

Topics include critiquing mainstream-culture assumptions about achievement and individualism, redefining themselves from consumers to stewards, shifting their focus from “the market of one” to hands-on community work, and strengthening a culture of generosity within their faith network.

Click here to register online now. This is a five-week course and the course fee is $49.95

The main objective of this course is to assist students as they engage and critique the culture in which they live, in their society and church. Class participants will:

• Assess Western assumptions about achievement,
• Examine consumerism to help shatter the myth of more,
• Review the influence of marketing and technology, and
• Strengthen a culture of generosity in their congregation.

As a result of this course, students will be able to speak more boldly on stewardship themes within culture, talk about the tension between following Jesus Christ and succumbing to the current consumer culture, and advocate a lifestyle that works with others to transform human systems to honor God.

There are four video sessions in this course. Students are expected to watch each video and post comments and respond to the questions posed for each session. In addition, class participants are encouraged to read Swimming Upstream: Reflections on consumerism and culture by Christine Roush.

There will be three total conference calls with the instructor: one conference call during the week before the course begins, one midway through the class, and one on the final Saturday of the course.

CEU credits are available.

Also, Registration is Open for "JG-01 - History, Polity and Ethos of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)”

We also have an online course designed for clergy who are seeking standing in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and need a history and polity course for their requirements. "JG-01 - History, Polity and Ethos of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)” is a fully-interactive course taught by Jr. Jerry Gladson that will meet these requirements.

If you need this course for standing, please check out the information. If you have a colleague who needs this course, please pass the information along.

Explore the history and polity of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) from its origins in the early 1800s to the present. This is a 12-week course that ends on April 9, 2016. The course contains 11 lessons with a total of 28 video lectures, required readings and writing assignments. This is a for-credit course.

Click here for details and a promotional video,