What is the Firestarters Academy?

The Firestarters Academy is being pioneered in order to meet the unique training needs of many Christian communities in a variety of different contexts, expressions, cultures, and nations. Whether you are a traditional house of prayer, a house of prayer hybrid, a local church, a worship team, a missions team, a small group, or a family, we will walk alongside you and help you develop and mature in the areas of authentic and healthy community, personal relationship with God, dynamic and enjoyable worship, powerful prayer and intercession, and missional awareness and activation. 

Our aim and guiding mandate is to inspire and multiply missional worship & prayer communities everywhere!

As we began to develop the Firestarters Academy, we had some very important goals in mind for what it needed to become in order to fulfill that God had called us to pioneer:

1. It must be accessible.  We have interacted with so many indigenous communities that are unable to travel internationally to attend localized trainings, but at the same time, we have realized that even the most remote villages often have internet access.  This motivated us to bring our training programs online. 
2. It must be driven by community.  Developing an online training program has its benefits and its challenges, and one of the biggest challenges is to creating real, authentic connection and community in an online environment.  With our focus being heavily on community development, it was essential for us to figure out how to do this well.
3. It must be contextual.  Every community is unique and has its own strengths, struggles, and areas of needed development.  We didn't want to create a one-size-fits-all program that did not take the context of our trainees and communities into consideration.
4. It must be affordable. Many of the communities who have the greatest need for training are in some of the poorest and most remote locations on earth.  We wanted to develop a program that was affordable enough for anyone to be able to do it, no matter what their living conditions are.
5. It must be multipliable. We needed for the training to not be too complicated or overbearing, and for people to be able to quickly implement it in their locations.  It needed to be experiencially-based, use simplified language, and have clear, practical applications.
6. It must be beneficial.  We didn't want to build something that looked good and sounded good, but ultimately did not produce lasting fruit in our trainees and communities.  Whatever the program ended up looking like, it needed to be effective, measurable, and truly beneficial to people who went through it.

Thinking Outside the Box

These goals inspired us to think outside the box when it comes to traditional institutions of learning.  As a core team, we have a long history in formal education and have developed a variety of different training programs throughout the years, but we didn't want to limit ourselves by our past experience, and most importantly, we didn't want to limit what God could do through this academy.

So we hired a Christian education consultant who was already pushing the boundaries and challenging the mindsets and effectiveness of current training institutions.  This consultant confronted the ways that we approach learning, and ultimately, he showed us a way forward that could truly meet all of our goals for the Firestarters Academy.  To learn more about competency-based education, Click Here.