The Perspectives course is returning to Madison for the first time since 2006. Beginning this coming Sunday evening, area residents have the opportunity to take a 16-week course that connects the local church, their local worshipping community, with the global church, the worldwide Christian movement that is charged with The Great Commission of spreading the gospel message.
“This is the best overall course in missions you could take,” said David Lippiatt, who is coordinating the class. “It’s a great tool for discerning some of the things that God has placed on your heart.”
David himself first took the class in 2003, driving weekly to Chicago as he was in the process of co-founding an international outreach called We International. Since then he has coordinated several offerings of the Perspectives class for the Madison area.
The class is offered on Sunday evenings at Door Creek Church, 6602 Dominion Drive, Madison. It begins Sunday, January 16, 2012, and runs through early May.
The Perspectives class was created in 1974 by the U.S. Center for World Mission, as an outgrowth of InterVarsity’s triennial Urbana Student Missions Conferences. It was designed to give more people the opportunity to learn about God’s global mission and what’s happening to fulfill that mission.
Wikipedia reports: “Perspectives on the World Christian Movement is a college level course offered in 200 locations across the U.S. (and in select places globally) with over 80,000 alumni in the U.S. and Canada. Now a ministry of the U.S. Center for World Mission, it seeks to examine the Biblical, historical, cultural and strategic dimensions of what God is doing around the world. Many students who come out of Perspectives decide to become missionaries, but it is really targeted at those who will mobilize, pray and otherwise promote and support mission in their local churches.”
More information on the Perspectives class can be obtained through the class Facebook page, by calling Door Creek Church at 608.222.8003, or by emailing David Lippiatt at dlippiatt@weinternational.org.
You can also listen to David Lippiatt discuss the class at a recent chapel service at InterVarsity’s National Service Center in Madison. He talks about how he learned about the Saharawi people through the class, a refugee tribe in Algeria. He has visited the tribe six times and traveled to the United Nations in New York City on the tribe’s behalf.
There’s also a short video about the Perspectives class on YouTube. And you can read more about the history of the Perspectives class in this report from Mission Network News.