As our progressively secular culture has proven more effective at evangelising the Church than the Church at evangelising the culture, our undestanding of mission, leadership, worship and spirituality has become so impoverished as to be sub-Christian. DTP is the story of one attempt to understand and face our reality, and to offer a remedy that has already been road-tested in the furnace of persecution, and has proven its ability to produce disciples willing to live, suffer and die for the witness of Christ amongst the nations of the world.

Whilst that remains standard Christian experience in much of the world today, the Western Church has largely squandered her legacy. As the prospect of persecution in the UK and elsewhere in Europe becomes inevitable, we must re-calibrate the whole way we think about following Jesus. We must retrieve the wisdom of the past for the Church of the future.

DTP is one attempt to re-habilitate the Catechumenate, a 3 year journey into the Christian life. Rather than seeking to make the Church accessible to the culture, pastors deconstructed the cultural impact on those becoming Christians and, by the Spirit, re-formed them into those who genuinely reflected the reality of Christ, and for whom Church was accessible. For centuries it was standard Church practise, and through it, Christians not merely survived persecution, but brought an Empire to Christ.

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Mark Prentice