A Bootcamp for Christians.
By author Walter Hegel
Boot Camp is a 6-month discipleship experience meant to establish Christian in their faith. If you are interested in participating in boot camp, please enter your email below.
Individuals who participate will be challenged:
to grow in their personal relationship with our living Lord
to grow in their understanding of the truths of the Christian faith
and grow in their understanding of themselves.
A strength of participating in this Boot Camp experience is that it will inspire you in giving you a bigger picture of what our Christian lives can and should look like. Participants will be stretched to develop and maintain personal habits so they can complete all assignments and that these personal disciplines will be manifested in their lives far beyond Boot Camp. Each participant’s tasks are:
Completing a “unit briefing” reading each month covering topics such as about the faith, who are Christians’ enemies, how do we deal with those enemies, authority, the Church, One- Anothering, managing our finances (from a heart level), suffering, and love.
Reading a monthly biography of people, such as: Gladys Aylward, George Muller, R. G. LeTourneau, Samuel Morris, Watchman Nee
Memorizing Bible verses
In addition to these individual assignments needing to be completed each month, there will also be an emphasis on community, because as Christians we were never meant to live the Christian life in isolation. So, with that in mind, participants will also be asked to:
Do a once week Marco Polo video post sharing with the group what the Lord is doing in their lives
Connecting weekly with a “Battle Buddy” to enhance a supportive, encouraging relationship with another participant.
Attending once every two weeks, an online Zoom meeting
There is no cost for participants, other than the biographies, which can either be bought online, relatively inexpensively on ebay or Amazon, or gotten at most public libraries.
I’m pleased to say that this Boot Camp experience will begin its 10th season, starting in September of 2025. It is non-denominational and is sustained by the Spirit’s leading, and word of mouth referrals. The three-part vision is for God to open doors of participation for individuals, young and old (men and women), married couples, and whole churches.
I hope that this brief overview whets your appetite for the opportunity for yourself and others to faithfully participate in something that I strongly believe will enhance your walk with Christ and strengthen the Body.
In addition to this overview of the format of Boot Camp, please let me share my heart. If you want to participate in this Boot Camp experience, you will find it helpful (as have others who have gone through it) to make some adjustments to help you have the time to get all the work done. For example, you can substitute Boot Camp materials for what you were reading in your quiet times. You can bring note cards to the car or to the train to help you get your memory work done. The issue is “Priorities get done” and the question for you is “are you willing to make this a priority”? To be honest, if you do not, you will struggle.
Two other thoughts come to mind that I believe you will find helpful when it comes to your time management. One is that going through this Boot Camp experience will provide you with many opportunities to gain experience of yourself (if you are willing). For example, you might find out (as many others have already) that you have a lot of free time, but you have been choosing to spend it watching Netflix, playing video games, or engaging in too much social media. These are activities not necessarily wrong, but you might (and probably will) recognize that your time is precious and will begin to see a greater opportunity to steward your time with more intentionality. The Boot Camp experience is meant to help us all establish habits that will bring us greater satisfaction in life as we live them with more eternal purpose, well beyond the next six months.
Another area of learning will come in understanding how you use your time. As many others have made the time to get all the work done, having sufficient time is not really the issue. It is just a matter of how you schedule your time and pacing yourself throughout the month to get everything done. I want to stress “pacing” as some people have gotten overly stressed before a unit starts when they see all the assignments needing to get done, but their issue is really that they have not taken the time to plan things out. There is a suitable time to get everything accomplished.
But, let me express one thing that needs to be mentioned. This Boot Camp experience is not going to be easy. It will be unlike most other Bible studies you have been in. It is meant to be that way because it is meant to help us create habits in our personal disciplines and to live with urgency and focus with our Christian walks. It is meant to help us get serious about our faith because we in America have lived too comfortably and too closely aligned with our world culture. This world system is just one of our enemies we have as Christians, and we need to recognize our enemies are relentless in their deceiving efforts. Lives of Christian brothers and sisters are being decimated all the time because of the neglect of our spiritual walks and that we have been caught off guard from enemy attacks.
With all that said, I’d like to share with you this link from Jocko Willink, a Navy Seals trainer regarding Navy Seal training. In this article, he talks about the utter brutalness of Seal’s training. He is unapologetic about the training’s severity because he says, “nothing compares to the challenges of combat”. He says they did nothing to mitigate the suffering for those who were committed enough to being a Seal. Here is another impactful statement in this article: “But I did not make the training brutal because I was sadistic or heartless. No. I made the training brutal because I cared about my fellow SEALs more than anything else in the world. I wanted them to be ready; I wanted them to be eminently prepared, mentally, and physically, for the most horrible of human endeavors: war. “
I understand this Boot Camp experience you are being invited to join is not military experience. However, the lessons of commitment, and hard work, and being part of a team are all transferable to what this Christian Boot Camp experience is all about. I’m asking you to submit yourself to a 6-month discipleship experience that will be challenging, but through it, as you give your all to One who is so worthy of giving Him our best efforts, I believe you will be equipped to live in a powerful, mighty- in- Spirit, kind of way, making yourself available to our Commander, the Lord of Hosts. The Body of Christ benefits from a quantity of disciples, but it benefits God and His kingdom purposes when there is quality in disciple makers.
Boot Camp’s theme verse, which you will come to appreciate is: 2 Timothy 2:3-4: Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4 No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.
Here is a bottom-line summary at the heart of this Boot Camp discipleship experience—It is a platform to help us reset in how we prioritize our life, so that we will live for God, who is so deserving of our honor and our gratefulness (Matthew 22:37-39). But, too often, for too many, we hold back from giving Him our best, and give Him leftovers or things we would discard, or from our surplus. (Read Malachi 1, and Luke 21:1-4 (the widow’s mite)).
I am convinced that every organization and every individual can envision “success”. Most people have some standard that becomes like a dream they long to see fulfilled, whether that is a financial goal, an attendance goal, or a quality of life and character they hope for.
But the reality is that although people and organizations can envision some hoped-for result, most of those same people and organizations will not put in the challenging work to see those results come to fruition.
This Boot Camp experience is meant to be an opportunity to create and sustain positive habits and establish you with Biblical understandings about practical issues. It is a 6-month experience requiring plenty of hard work and time. For each of us, as we go through Boot Camp, the issue is not how we are spending our time, but rather where we will be investing it. We are seeking to be faithful to a discipleship experience which will yield a positive return for us now, as well as for eternity.
Is your participation in Boot Camp right for you? I believe so because it is a way for God to stretch you and enlarge your capacity in spiritual growth. It will not be easy, but it will be worth it.
God desires to conform us to the image of His Son. He sees our potential, which He desires to produce in and through us, but we must be willing to submit to His governance in our lives. Boot Camp is one way in which He can bring about great change in your life.
If you want to participate please enter your email here.
