THE APPRENTICE TRACK

Each month, we’ll spend a day in person dialoguing about the monthly reading, sharing the contours of our practice and lived experience, and learning from teachers/practitioners around the themes of the spiritual life and growth.

Apprentice Gathering Components:

• Cohort Sharing and Group Discussion

• 2 Teaching Sessions

• Q&A w/ Guest Teacher

• Prayer & Practice

• Ministry Time

• Catered Lunch (*cost included)

10am-4pm in Costa Mesa

Sep. 2023 - May 2024

September 28th Welcome Dinner

2023: 10/19, 11/16, 12/7

2024: 1/18, 2/22-24 (Retreat), 3/21, 4/18

The Apprentice track will consist of 30 or so leaders who are grouped into smaller cohorts of 6 people. These cohorts will sit together each month for our gatherings, connect for Cohort Meetups (at least once per month), and be accompanied by two Apprentice Guides who serve as a hosts and mentors for the duration of the Apprentice Track.

The Apprentice Track Resource Guide will provide a simple path week-to-week that will help move our learnings from our heads to our lives and hearts through simple, sustained and intentional practice, reflection, and dialogue.

Over the course of these 9-months we’ll read 6 books together focusing on the central spiritual practices common throughout the history of the Church and engage with the supplemental material & practices in the Apprentice Track Resource Guide.

Booklist:

• Invitation to Silence and Solitude by Ruth Haley Barton

• Prayer by Richard Foster

• Shaped by the Word by M. Robert Mulholland

• Subversive Sabbath by A.J. Swoboda

• Abundant Simplicity by Jan Johnson

• Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Even if these are familiar texts to you, reading them with others in this process will undoubtedly bring new insight, new challenge, new invitations, and create the environment to move from mere insight to growth. The content always serves as a place of entry into deeper areas of growth. It’s not just information to ingest, but an invitation for a new way of living and being.

While the resource Guide will provide a place for journaling, deeper reflection, and tracking your experience, the Online Community Hub is a place for us to engage with one another daily through directed prompts, group sharing and discussion, prayer invitations/requests, and anything that people want to share with each other.

Hosted within the Mighty Networks platform, the hub is an easy tool to use and a great way to deepen relationships between the Cohort Meetups and Monthly Gatherings.

Apprentice Guides will serve as mentors and group hosts throughout the Apprentice Track. These men and women are prayerfully invited to be Guides because of their spiritual maturity, wisdom, and familiarity with the nuances of the spiritual formation journey. Furthermore, they each have experience in local church ministry, whether as spiritual directors, or counselors, or serving in various ministry leadership.

We are all beginners in our life with God, as Eugene Peterson says, but some are more familiar with the beginning terrain than others—and these are the gifts of having Guides with us on the way.

Every-other-month, Roots&Embers hosts an open worship night for its growing community of friends, pastors, and practitioners. This means that on the evenings following every other Apprentice Gathering, there will be a night of corporate worship, prayer and ministry time.

We want this to be a priority for the Apprentices to have a space where they can be refreshed and step into the ministry of the Spirit in a context where they aren’t required to lead or facilitate the service environment. The goal is that you might show up and be attentive to where the Spirit might lead.