What is TEE?

TEE is a training approach for whole-life and life-long discipleship. TEE equips disciples, including leaders, in the context of their daily lives. Click here to watch our 2-minute animation on TEE!

We like to describe TEE as Tools to Equip and Empower.

We can say that TEE is:

Tools for local churches

to equip and empower all their members

to grow in Christ and serve him actively.

Local, church-based learning groups combine these three elements:

Personal study | Group meeting | Practical application

TEE is for all believers, men and women, from every walk of life. From new believers to leaders and influencers in church and society. God wants all his people to grow as his disciples, not just the 1% who become church leaders or theological educators or missionaries. TEE offers a way to do this.

Churches across Asia, and in fact around the world, use TEE effectively to disciple new believers and also to equip church leaders for their role.

TEE works best when local churches use it as the core of their intentional discipleship. The structured combination of three elements

Personal Study

The first step is personal study. Participants work through a carefully prepared lesson that involves active learning, not passive reading. The lesson helps them engage with Scripture, gain new knowledge, and start to connect it with their own life experience. All this becomes a springboard to the next learning step.

Group meeting

The second step is the group meeting. The group is small enough to allow every member to contribute. Helped by a trained group leader, members share what they discovered in the first step, reflect on their own experience, and learn from one another. They study Scripture together and may use role-play, learning tasks, and other group activities as well as discussion. The group leader facilitates the group interactions and does not give an extended lecture. The group time leads to the third step.

Practical application

The third step is practical application. Whatever was learned in steps one and two must now be applied in members’ daily life at home, work, church, and the wider community. Practical application, the integration of learning and living under the Lordship of Jesus, is the goal of TEE courses. So, this step involves a specific assignment – whether for personal life, ministry, or mission. Assignments may be for individual group members, or for the group as a whole. In some cases, it may include discovery learning in preparation for the next topic in the course.

These three elements link together in a learning cycle. Repeated week by week, the learning cycle becomes a habit integrated in people’s lives. In this way people grow in discipleship and faith. A TEE course typically lasts around ten weeks.

Many pastors report how they have seen their church grow and change after using TEE. Here are just two examples:

Senior Pastor Chung Hyun Goo, Young Dong Church in Seoul, South Korea:

“There are things to which a senior pastor must go, or things which a senior pastor must do. However, those who were trained by TEE are doing many of the things which a senior pastor used to do. They are building a church where they work and I am very proud of them."

Pastor Heru, GKJTU Church, in Java, Indonesia:

We see TEE as an effective method of discipleship. TEE not only teaches but also transforms the participants and in turn leads to growth. When individual lives are transformed, the congregation is also transformed. In TEE, all members participateand do practical homework. They do not just gain head knowledge but experience faithin action when they apply Jesus’s teachings."

There are hundreds of TEE courses available in different languages. You can search the database to see what courses are available in your language or the language of your church or mission agency.

Many of our members use the tried and tested courses from SEAN International. Among the most widely used are foundation level courses Abundant Life and Abundant Light for new believers. A series of six courses called The Life of Christ is used successfully by many of our members to train pastors and ministers for their leadership in the church.

Increase is committed to writing new courses for the 21st century context in Asia. These new courses address specific needs in local contexts in Asia and are written by our members. Responding to Persecution and Ministry to Teens are a few examples. Come Follow Me is a course specifically for believers from a Muslim background.