Hi, students of the Christian Ministry Certification course. I'm Brenda Vega and I am your instructor for this course. If you need to reach me, you can reach me at B Vega at Lakewood dot E D U. That's B Vega at Lakewood dot E D U. I hope you enjoy the course. In this course, we will be talking about various Christian vocations and areas of ministry inside the church and outside of the church. You'll have an opportunity to learn about foundational truths and beliefs and various doctrine. For example, we'll talk about baptism, we'll take a look at salvation. We'll help you to activate your faith and we'll teach you how to pray so that you pray in a way that gets results. We'll also look at giving and kingdom economics. You'll have an opportunity to explore areas such as spiritual authority. We will dive into spiritual warfare. In this course, you'll have a chance to practice being a healer. You'll have a chance to look at your spiritual gifts and many of you will be surprised at all of the gifts that God has blessed you with will discuss leadership in ministry and in the church including women in leadership. And finally, you'll have a chance to practice soul winning and making disciples so that we can be obedient to God's greatest commandment, to go to love one another first and then to go into all the world and make disciples to be successful in this course. First of all, you need to come to this course with an open heart and with an open mind, much of the work that you will do involves reading. It involves looking at scripture and it involves writing. Uh So you will have to get used to expressing your opinion, thinking critically uh about what it is that you are writing about. Um become very familiar with our instructional platform so that you can easily upload your assignments, make sure that you uh comment in the discussion uh on the discussion board uh and engage other students in uh in dialogue. This is your group. And so you wanna have vigorous discussions about uh the things that you are learning questions that you might have, uh things like that also read your assignment carefully. Sometimes your assignments are one or two parts. And so oftentimes, studentss will turn in one part and I have to go back to them and say this was a two part assignment. So you'll have to redo certain parts of that. Well, just read your assignment carefully and uh do what it asks you to do. Sometimes it'll ask you to write, you know, two pages about a certain topic. Um, whatever amount of pages it asks you to write, don't be that one that wants to do just enough, feel free if you need to fully explore or fully discuss what you're writing about to write a couple of more pages, I'm not going to be upset about that. Also, proof read your submission. If you have challenges with writing, I'm sure that the Success Center, your success coach, the student center can help you uh with materials that will help you to become uh a more concise, a more clear writer, follow the rules of punctuation, please. So that we don't have to try to decipher what you mean, but that you can write exactly what you mean. And finally, in this course, unlike a math course or unlike some other courses, come with your Bible and meditate on the word and explore the word and study the Word of God. Because remember the point of this course is for you to grow and you can't grow without the word. I'm so excited um to be teaching this course. And one of the reasons I am so excited is because it is part of my life, purpose and my life mission to instruct, to educate, to encourage and to motivate people to grow. I love growth. I created this course because as a teacher for the Department of Defense for many years, as a pastor, uh having founded and led uh various ministries. I noticed that oftentimes people come into ministry with good intentions and with a good heart and a desire to serve, but they don't know how. And so I created this course to help, to give people some background, some grounding. Uh number one for their personal relationship with Christ, their personal relationship with the church and with their leaders and also for their personal growth, both and so that they come into a ministry and they have a, a foundational background that will help them to be a help to the ministry and not a hindrance that they come in with knowledge and not just good intentions. So I hope that you get a lot of out of this course that you grow from being in this course and that you are encouraged and motivated to go and make disciples all over the world.
