Consider the following:
A small group leader is frustrated. His members are passive during discussion time. They wait eagerly but they won’t participate.
In another group within the same church, the leader spends hours each week preparing. But after a time of eating and fellowship, nobody is ready to settle down and listen.
In yet another group, someone [...]
I want to talk about when and how we should give money to each other.
I had started this post quite differently. I had all these things to say about the growing decentralized power structure in the church. They were deep things, and they were probably mostly true.
But they weren’t really important.
My experiences I think are [...]
Last post, I shared a number of discussion questions that a small group might apply to any book or chapter of the bible. Today, I’m going to share some template questions that can (more-or-less) be applied to other things a small group might wish to study or discuss.
Template #2: For a chapter of a Non-fiction [...]
One of the things I’ve been working at doing, as small group director for Fellowship Church, is create a list of approved and reccomended curricula for our small groups to use.
These resources were chosen because they tend to be interactive and application oriented, and they avoid unnecesarily divisive issues that will create more problems than [...]
Here is a link to a post where I explain why I believe small group leaders should often resist the urge to offer up answers to questions that can be seen as tough. If we’re not answering questions, the natural question is this: Just what should a small group leader do when tough questions [...]
February 21, 2008 – 12:56 pm
Patience is required for small group leaders on two different levels. Call it big-picture patience and little picture patience.
Big-picture patience is trusting in God over a period of weeks or months. There are several areas that this can be hard. One is in the area of the size of the group.
When it becomes time to [...]
February 20, 2008 – 12:36 am
There are two temptations that I’ve struggled with in my role as small group director. Both are related, in some sense, to not taking care of myself. The first way that it’s tempting not to take care of myself is that it’s tempting to not engage in critical activities like prayer and reading scripture. The [...]
January 1, 2008 – 5:12 pm
My hope is that this post will be read by folks who have experience with how other churches do small groups. I’ve got a few questions on my mind, this morning. These are some of our greatest challenges in the small group ministry at Fellowship Church in Holden, Massachusetts. It occurs to me that it [...]
