Course Description
Discipleship Track: Core is the foundational starting point for disciples at PORVA. It is designed to establish the essential beliefs, practices, and rhythms every disciple needs before moving on to Discipleship Track: Extended.
Core is a 12-week journey built around one central goal: learning from scripture how to actually live as a disciple of Jesus. The first six weeks, called Discover, focus on laying a clear biblical foundation by exploring purpose, Scripture, salvation, and doctrine so you know what you believe and why it matters.
The next six weeks, called Develop, shift from understanding truth to practicing it, helping you form habits, rhythms, and community disciplines that shape everyday faith. Together, Discover and Develop move discipleship out of theory and into real life, inviting you to organize your life around Jesus and grow in a way that lasts.
Those who complete DT: Core receive a Certificate in Biblical Studies and are equipped to step into higher-level ministry opportunities at PORVA.
Sign up HERE
Core is a 12-week journey built around one central goal: learning from scripture how to actually live as a disciple of Jesus. The first six weeks, called Discover, focus on laying a clear biblical foundation by exploring purpose, Scripture, salvation, and doctrine so you know what you believe and why it matters.
The next six weeks, called Develop, shift from understanding truth to practicing it, helping you form habits, rhythms, and community disciplines that shape everyday faith. Together, Discover and Develop move discipleship out of theory and into real life, inviting you to organize your life around Jesus and grow in a way that lasts.
Those who complete DT: Core receive a Certificate in Biblical Studies and are equipped to step into higher-level ministry opportunities at PORVA.
Sign up HERE
Weekly Summary: Discover & Develop
Week 1: Discover Your Purpose
This opening lesson reframes purpose by showing that it isn’t found in big moments or self-focused fulfillment, but in becoming a disciple of Jesus. You’ll gain clarity on what discipleship actually means and how Jesus calls His followers to organize their lives around being with Him, becoming like Him, and doing what He did. You’ll walk away with a clearer sense of direction, a healthier understanding of purpose, and a compelling vision for what following Jesus is really meant to look like.
Week 2: Discover the Power of the Word
This lesson centers on why the Bible is not just a helpful resource, but God’s primary way of revealing truth, direction, and clarity for our lives. You’ll learn how Scripture anchors our faith, protects us from speculation and confusion, and provides a trustworthy foundation for understanding who God is and how He calls us to live. You’ll leave with greater confidence in approaching the Bible, practical tools for interpreting it wisely, and a renewed motivation to let God’s Word shape your thinking and daily decisions.
Week 3: Discover the Plan of Salvation, Part 1
This lesson brings the focus to the most urgent question the Bible answers: what it actually means to be saved and how to respond to God without relying on opinions or tradition. You’ll walk through Jesus’ conversation about being “born again” and then follow the message preached in Acts 2 to see the gospel presented with clarity and conviction. You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of why salvation is not just something to believe, but something to obey through repentance, baptism in Jesus’ name, and receiving the Holy Spirit.
Week 4: Discover the Plan of Salvation, Part 2
This lesson traces the plan of salvation across the Book of Acts, showing how the apostles consistently preached and practiced the same gospel as the church expanded beyond Jerusalem. You’ll follow real people as they respond to the message, from Samaritans to Gentiles, and see why receiving the Holy Spirit and being baptized in Jesus’ name were treated as essential, not optional. You’ll leave with stronger biblical confidence in the New Birth pattern, clarity on the purpose of baptism in Jesus’ name, and a deeper conviction to respond to the gospel with full obedience.
Week 5: Discover Doctrine, Part 1
This lesson challenges the idea that passion or tradition alone are enough by showing why truth must be anchored in what Scripture actually teaches. You’ll learn why doctrine matters for every disciple, how untested beliefs and emotional faith can lead people off course, and why the apostles treated sound doctrine as essential to spiritual life. This lesson lays a critical foundation by grounding faith in biblical truth, preparing you to understand God rightly and keep your walk with Him steady, confident, and aligned with Scripture.
Week 6: Discover Doctrine, Part 2
This lesson focuses on how beliefs about God are formed and why doctrinal clarity is essential for a healthy, lasting walk with Him. You’ll trace how the apostles understood Jesus through Scripture and how that understanding shaped their teaching, worship, and mission in the early church. This lesson provides a stabilizing framework for faith, helping you move beyond assumptions or inherited ideas and stay anchored in clear, biblical truth.
Week 7: Developing a Manager’s Mindset, Part 1
This lesson marks the shift from discovering truth to developing the habits and mindsets that shape daily faith. You’ll explore biblical stewardship as a way of life, learning how Scripture reframes ownership, responsibility, and pressure by calling believers to manage what God has entrusted to them. By identifying common patterns of mismanagement and contrasting them with God’s design, this lesson establishes a practical foundation for stewarding time, relationships, resources, and purpose with clarity, trust, and obedience.
Week 8: Developing a Manager’s Mindset, Part 2
This lesson takes stewardship from a big idea to everyday practice by focusing on the areas where most of us actually feel the pressure. You’ll look at time as your most limited resource and learn why wise stewardship is less about doing more and more about choosing what matters, moving at a pace that protects peace, presence, and spiritual health. You’ll also explore how testimony and influence are shaped in ordinary routines, not just dramatic moments, and why kingdom impact is often found in faithful attention to the people already in your path. Finally, you’ll examine stewardship in relationships and serving, confronting common excuses and reframing talents as something entrusted to be used, not just admired. The goal is simple: align daily life with God’s priorities so your faith shows up where it counts most.
Week 9: Developing a Manager’s Mindset, Part 3
This lesson brings stewardship into one of the most practical parts of everyday life by talking honestly about money and possessions. You’ll look at why Jesus spoke about resources so often, how the Bible connects generosity to trust and worship, and why what we do with money quietly shapes our hearts. Rather than focusing on pressure or guilt, this lesson helps reframe giving as alignment with God’s priorities, offering a healthier, faith-filled way to steward resources with freedom, confidence, and purpose.
Week 10: Developing Spiritual Discipline, Part 1
This lesson introduces spiritual disciplines as the steady practices that shape lasting growth, helping disciples move from inspiration to real formation. You’ll explore why these habits matter and how they create space for God to work. By reframing spiritual discipline as pursuit instead of perfection, this lesson invites you to build sustainable rhythms that foster clarity, intimacy, and a growing hunger for God.
Week 11: Developing Spiritual Disciplines, Part 2
This lesson focuses on prayer as a simple, relational discipline that helps disciples stay connected to Jesus in everyday life. You’ll explore why prayer doesn’t require perfect words or techniques, how consistent rhythms create space for God to work, and how different types of prayer shape a healthy, growing relationship with Him. By reframing prayer as honest communication rather than performance, this lesson invites you to build a prayer life that is sustainable, personal, and rooted in closeness with God.
Week 12: Developing Spiritual Disciplines, Part 3
This lesson focuses on the community disciplines that shape disciples as they follow Jesus together, not in isolation. You’ll explore why practices like gathering, spiritual leadership, accountability, generosity, forgiveness, and celebration are essential to spiritual growth and protection. By reframing discipleship as a shared journey, this lesson highlights how God uses community to form us, strengthen us, and keep our walk with Him healthy and grounded.
This opening lesson reframes purpose by showing that it isn’t found in big moments or self-focused fulfillment, but in becoming a disciple of Jesus. You’ll gain clarity on what discipleship actually means and how Jesus calls His followers to organize their lives around being with Him, becoming like Him, and doing what He did. You’ll walk away with a clearer sense of direction, a healthier understanding of purpose, and a compelling vision for what following Jesus is really meant to look like.
Week 2: Discover the Power of the Word
This lesson centers on why the Bible is not just a helpful resource, but God’s primary way of revealing truth, direction, and clarity for our lives. You’ll learn how Scripture anchors our faith, protects us from speculation and confusion, and provides a trustworthy foundation for understanding who God is and how He calls us to live. You’ll leave with greater confidence in approaching the Bible, practical tools for interpreting it wisely, and a renewed motivation to let God’s Word shape your thinking and daily decisions.
Week 3: Discover the Plan of Salvation, Part 1
This lesson brings the focus to the most urgent question the Bible answers: what it actually means to be saved and how to respond to God without relying on opinions or tradition. You’ll walk through Jesus’ conversation about being “born again” and then follow the message preached in Acts 2 to see the gospel presented with clarity and conviction. You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of why salvation is not just something to believe, but something to obey through repentance, baptism in Jesus’ name, and receiving the Holy Spirit.
Week 4: Discover the Plan of Salvation, Part 2
This lesson traces the plan of salvation across the Book of Acts, showing how the apostles consistently preached and practiced the same gospel as the church expanded beyond Jerusalem. You’ll follow real people as they respond to the message, from Samaritans to Gentiles, and see why receiving the Holy Spirit and being baptized in Jesus’ name were treated as essential, not optional. You’ll leave with stronger biblical confidence in the New Birth pattern, clarity on the purpose of baptism in Jesus’ name, and a deeper conviction to respond to the gospel with full obedience.
Week 5: Discover Doctrine, Part 1
This lesson challenges the idea that passion or tradition alone are enough by showing why truth must be anchored in what Scripture actually teaches. You’ll learn why doctrine matters for every disciple, how untested beliefs and emotional faith can lead people off course, and why the apostles treated sound doctrine as essential to spiritual life. This lesson lays a critical foundation by grounding faith in biblical truth, preparing you to understand God rightly and keep your walk with Him steady, confident, and aligned with Scripture.
Week 6: Discover Doctrine, Part 2
This lesson focuses on how beliefs about God are formed and why doctrinal clarity is essential for a healthy, lasting walk with Him. You’ll trace how the apostles understood Jesus through Scripture and how that understanding shaped their teaching, worship, and mission in the early church. This lesson provides a stabilizing framework for faith, helping you move beyond assumptions or inherited ideas and stay anchored in clear, biblical truth.
Week 7: Developing a Manager’s Mindset, Part 1
This lesson marks the shift from discovering truth to developing the habits and mindsets that shape daily faith. You’ll explore biblical stewardship as a way of life, learning how Scripture reframes ownership, responsibility, and pressure by calling believers to manage what God has entrusted to them. By identifying common patterns of mismanagement and contrasting them with God’s design, this lesson establishes a practical foundation for stewarding time, relationships, resources, and purpose with clarity, trust, and obedience.
Week 8: Developing a Manager’s Mindset, Part 2
This lesson takes stewardship from a big idea to everyday practice by focusing on the areas where most of us actually feel the pressure. You’ll look at time as your most limited resource and learn why wise stewardship is less about doing more and more about choosing what matters, moving at a pace that protects peace, presence, and spiritual health. You’ll also explore how testimony and influence are shaped in ordinary routines, not just dramatic moments, and why kingdom impact is often found in faithful attention to the people already in your path. Finally, you’ll examine stewardship in relationships and serving, confronting common excuses and reframing talents as something entrusted to be used, not just admired. The goal is simple: align daily life with God’s priorities so your faith shows up where it counts most.
Week 9: Developing a Manager’s Mindset, Part 3
This lesson brings stewardship into one of the most practical parts of everyday life by talking honestly about money and possessions. You’ll look at why Jesus spoke about resources so often, how the Bible connects generosity to trust and worship, and why what we do with money quietly shapes our hearts. Rather than focusing on pressure or guilt, this lesson helps reframe giving as alignment with God’s priorities, offering a healthier, faith-filled way to steward resources with freedom, confidence, and purpose.
Week 10: Developing Spiritual Discipline, Part 1
This lesson introduces spiritual disciplines as the steady practices that shape lasting growth, helping disciples move from inspiration to real formation. You’ll explore why these habits matter and how they create space for God to work. By reframing spiritual discipline as pursuit instead of perfection, this lesson invites you to build sustainable rhythms that foster clarity, intimacy, and a growing hunger for God.
Week 11: Developing Spiritual Disciplines, Part 2
This lesson focuses on prayer as a simple, relational discipline that helps disciples stay connected to Jesus in everyday life. You’ll explore why prayer doesn’t require perfect words or techniques, how consistent rhythms create space for God to work, and how different types of prayer shape a healthy, growing relationship with Him. By reframing prayer as honest communication rather than performance, this lesson invites you to build a prayer life that is sustainable, personal, and rooted in closeness with God.
Week 12: Developing Spiritual Disciplines, Part 3
This lesson focuses on the community disciplines that shape disciples as they follow Jesus together, not in isolation. You’ll explore why practices like gathering, spiritual leadership, accountability, generosity, forgiveness, and celebration are essential to spiritual growth and protection. By reframing discipleship as a shared journey, this lesson highlights how God uses community to form us, strengthen us, and keep our walk with Him healthy and grounded.
Course Description
Discipleship Track: Extended Studies is designed for those who have completed Discipleship Track Core and are ready to go deeper. We’re starting 2026 by going back to the beginning - before commentaries, study tools, and before Scripture lived on pages anyone could possess. God’s Word first took shape in living communities - spoken, remembered, and practiced among people formed by Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek language and culture.
This first six-week series, The Languages of Scripture, steps into those ancient worlds to explore how God chose to communicate through real languages, real cultures, and real historical moments across the Old and New Testaments. By slowing down and listening carefully, we begin to see how meaning was shaped long before modern study habits ever existed. As we trace how Scripture lived and moved in its original setting, our confidence in God’s Word deepens. For disciples of Jesus, learning how God spoke then sharpens how we listen now, grounding our obedience and shaping how we live today.
Completing DT: Extended courses includes an advanced certification and reflects deeper biblical formation that helps prepare disciples for greater responsibility and service within PORVA and beyond its walls.
Sign up HERE.
This first six-week series, The Languages of Scripture, steps into those ancient worlds to explore how God chose to communicate through real languages, real cultures, and real historical moments across the Old and New Testaments. By slowing down and listening carefully, we begin to see how meaning was shaped long before modern study habits ever existed. As we trace how Scripture lived and moved in its original setting, our confidence in God’s Word deepens. For disciples of Jesus, learning how God spoke then sharpens how we listen now, grounding our obedience and shaping how we live today.
Completing DT: Extended courses includes an advanced certification and reflects deeper biblical formation that helps prepare disciples for greater responsibility and service within PORVA and beyond its walls.
Sign up HERE.
Weekly Summary: The Languages of Scripture
Week 1: Why Language and Culture Matter in Scripture
This opening lesson sets the tone for the entire Extended track by slowing us down and reshaping how we approach Scripture. You’ll explore how the Bible emerged in oral cultures where God’s Word was heard, remembered, and lived long before it was privately studied. By examining how language always carries culture with it, this lesson helps uncover the hidden assumptions modern readers bring to the text.
Week 2: Hebrew and the World of Ancient Israel
This lesson steps into the cultural world of ancient Israel to explore how Hebrew language and culture shaped the way God revealed Himself to His people. You’ll see how Scripture formed a covenant community through story, law, poetry, and ritual, rather than abstract theology. By understanding concepts like “knowing,” “walking,” blessing, and obedience through Israel’s lived experience, this lesson helps the Old Testament come alive as God forming a people in real space and time.
Week 3: Aramaic and Life Under Empire
This lesson explores faith under pressure by examining Aramaic, the everyday language of empire, exile, and survival. You’ll trace how Israel’s identity was reshaped during foreign rule and how Scripture was translated, explained, and lived outside the temple system. By looking at figures like Daniel, Ezra, and Jesus Himself, you’ll see how God continued speaking intimately to His people even in displacement and oppression.
Week 4: Greek and the World of the Early Church
This lesson focuses on how the Greek language helped carry the gospel across cities, cultures, and continents. You’ll explore how the early church moved from village-based faith to multi-ethnic communities shaped by apostolic teaching, letters, and shared confession. By understanding how Greek provided precision for doctrine and clarity for instruction, this lesson helps you read the New Testament as intentional teaching for real churches facing real challenges.
Week 5: How Ancient Believers Lived the Word
This lesson challenges the modern idea that understanding must come before obedience by exploring how ancient believers lived out Scripture - often with partial understanding but full loyalty. You’ll see how faithfulness was measured by response, not mastery, and how Scripture shaped life through trust, repetition, and practice. By reframing obedience as the pathway to clarity, this lesson invites disciples to move from over-analysis into lived faithfulness, trusting God to reveal understanding along the way.
Week 6: When the Word Crossed Cultures
This lesson explores what happened when the same Scriptures entered radically different ancient cultures - from Jewish communities to Gentile cities and the heart of the Roman world. You’ll see how Scripture confronted values, reshaped ethics, and formed countercultural communities without losing its authority or message. By tracing how God’s Word unified believers across languages and regions, this lesson highlights Scripture’s power to shape people without erasing cultural differences. Disciples leave with a renewed understanding of Scripture as living, authoritative, and transformative wherever it goes.
This opening lesson sets the tone for the entire Extended track by slowing us down and reshaping how we approach Scripture. You’ll explore how the Bible emerged in oral cultures where God’s Word was heard, remembered, and lived long before it was privately studied. By examining how language always carries culture with it, this lesson helps uncover the hidden assumptions modern readers bring to the text.
Week 2: Hebrew and the World of Ancient Israel
This lesson steps into the cultural world of ancient Israel to explore how Hebrew language and culture shaped the way God revealed Himself to His people. You’ll see how Scripture formed a covenant community through story, law, poetry, and ritual, rather than abstract theology. By understanding concepts like “knowing,” “walking,” blessing, and obedience through Israel’s lived experience, this lesson helps the Old Testament come alive as God forming a people in real space and time.
Week 3: Aramaic and Life Under Empire
This lesson explores faith under pressure by examining Aramaic, the everyday language of empire, exile, and survival. You’ll trace how Israel’s identity was reshaped during foreign rule and how Scripture was translated, explained, and lived outside the temple system. By looking at figures like Daniel, Ezra, and Jesus Himself, you’ll see how God continued speaking intimately to His people even in displacement and oppression.
Week 4: Greek and the World of the Early Church
This lesson focuses on how the Greek language helped carry the gospel across cities, cultures, and continents. You’ll explore how the early church moved from village-based faith to multi-ethnic communities shaped by apostolic teaching, letters, and shared confession. By understanding how Greek provided precision for doctrine and clarity for instruction, this lesson helps you read the New Testament as intentional teaching for real churches facing real challenges.
Week 5: How Ancient Believers Lived the Word
This lesson challenges the modern idea that understanding must come before obedience by exploring how ancient believers lived out Scripture - often with partial understanding but full loyalty. You’ll see how faithfulness was measured by response, not mastery, and how Scripture shaped life through trust, repetition, and practice. By reframing obedience as the pathway to clarity, this lesson invites disciples to move from over-analysis into lived faithfulness, trusting God to reveal understanding along the way.
Week 6: When the Word Crossed Cultures
This lesson explores what happened when the same Scriptures entered radically different ancient cultures - from Jewish communities to Gentile cities and the heart of the Roman world. You’ll see how Scripture confronted values, reshaped ethics, and formed countercultural communities without losing its authority or message. By tracing how God’s Word unified believers across languages and regions, this lesson highlights Scripture’s power to shape people without erasing cultural differences. Disciples leave with a renewed understanding of Scripture as living, authoritative, and transformative wherever it goes.