About

About the course

On the Way is a digital discipleship course written by Adrian Roux for the South Kent Methodist Circuit and beyond. It works through Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians in seven sessions — the oldest surviving Christian document, read as a pastoral and political letter to a young, harassed church in a Roman free city.

The course is rooted in the Wesleyan tradition: prevenient grace, social holiness, the means of grace, personal piety integrated with social action. Liberation theology is its closest conversation partner — the language of Freire, Tutu, Ubuntu, structural sin, systemic injustice. The incarnational is the default frame: God present in the ordinary, the broken, and the searching.

The course is heavily indebted to John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed's In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2004), and to Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan's The First Paul (2009).

Each session in three layers

Pre-session preparation, spread across the days before the small group meets — a short video, a passage to read, and notebook questions to bring.

In-session work, around two hours for the first session and closer to ninety minutes thereafter, designed for small lay-led groups. Welcome and covenant; the passage read aloud; first impressions; an exegetical key supported by a short video and slides; open conversation; a practice for the week.

After-session reflection through the week, working with the Methodist Way of Life as the frame for living the passage out. The heart of the week is named in one sentence at the top; four reflections under the four MWoL commitments follow.

Author

Adrian Roux is a Methodist presbyter and Superintendent Minister of the South Kent Methodist Circuit, with an MBA awarded with distinction and a Masters in Theology focused on incarnational pneumatology. He preaches across six churches in Ashford and Folkestone & Hythe and lives with his family in Kent.