About Us

5 Ways DownLine Serves the Local Church

Our institute is a 9-month intensive training program committed to equipping clergy and lay leaders in Biblical disciple-making. The Institute accepts 120 students each year from the Memphis community and beyond and trains them in Bible, Discipleship, and Biblical Manhood/Womanhood. Our goal is that each graduate may be well-equipped to make disciples in their home and local church, and practice discipleship as a lifestyle in their community. Students must have a pastor recommendation to be accepted.

Curriculum

DL seeks to provide “top-notch” Biblical curriculum in our effort to resource individuals and churches that are committed to disciple-making. We have just released our brand new DVD Series entitled: “DownLine Discipleship:

Integrating Christ’s Strategy for Ministry into your Everyday Life”. This curriculum is not only a great tool for individuals who seek to be properly equipped to make disciples, but is also a great resource for small group leaders and churches to use for training others. It includes over eight hours of teaching with insightful interviews on disciple-making from Christian leaders such as Tom Nelson, Kay Arthur, Matt Chandler, Crawford Loritts, Joe White, Janie Ortlund, Robert Coleman, and many others. DL is committed to the continual production of quality resources that equip the church to make disciples in the years to come.

Church Staff Training and Consulting

Staff training and consulting is designed to aid church leaders and staff in strategically thinking through how to best equip their body to make disciples. This process is most effectively done during a two-day window, in which an executive staff member of the DL team spends the first day assessing the local church or ministry context in which you are serving and then shares fundamental principles of Biblical disciple-making which can then be contextualized and implemented. The second day is used to think through the various methods and best practices by which these timeless principles can be most effectively fleshed out in your specific setting.Often times, staff training and consulting is a great prelude to church training, which may include a larger group of lay leaders. The staff, having been through the training, can then leverage the church training to catalyze disciple-making efforts in and through their local body.

Church or Ministry Training

Church/Ministry training is designed to train a church body as well as a ministry staff/team. For this training, DL provides the opportunity for a church or ministry to craft a “retreat” setting specifically for their local church.

Ideally, this would entail eight hours of training, though, can be done in 4-10 hours. From our experience thus far, this training is best executed over a single weekend, though it can also be done one night per week for a couple of months, depending on proximity. This is a great way to instill a Biblical paradigm and practical handles on disciple-making into your elders, deacons, small group leaders, Sunday school teachers, or even your entire local body.

Summit

The DownLine Summit is a part of Downline’s overall effort to ignite a restoration of Biblical disciple-making in and through the local church by equipping, educating, and inspiring Christ-followers to make disciples. Serving as our “wide gate” opportunity, a Summit weekend can serve as a powerful time of shared insight and equipping in the life of a believer. It is also our great hope that churches might utilize the Summit to further fan the flame of disciple-making in the hearts of their people and to leverage this training back in their local church context.