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Deeper into Community with your Group
By Paul | November 2, 2007
What does your group do besides sit and talk?
God can deepen relationships and give greater purpose to the group when members go beyond the weekly meeting to broaden the scope of their interaction and add active dimensions to their group life. Here are a few categories to consider:
Serve Together Whether it is helping someone in the group, participating as a group in things such as Fall Frenzy or ShareFest, or initiating your own service project, serving together has at least four great benefits: 1) Doing something with an outward focus enhances the sense of purpose of a group, 2) Working together reveals qualities in people that don’t come out solely in verbal interaction, 3) Active service provides great disciple-making opportunities, and 4) Members with less-verbal personalities and gifting get to exercise their gifts and leadership. Here are a few examples of how groups have gotten a boost from “extra-curricular” service together:
• Joy AM groups put on birthday parties for Rowena Chess third-graders.
• The Wagoner/Busick GROW Group serves together once a month at the Skills Development Mission.
• Men in Lynn Patterson’s Ironmen group help him with projects at Eastgate school.
• The Tuan Resonate group has served together several times to support the Domestic Violence Shelter.
• The Waddell GROW Group put on a dinner for Grace Clinic volunteers.
• Many groups served together at the recent Fall Frenzy events.
The upcoming holiday season provides many opportunities for groups to join together for service such as help a needy family, fill shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child, serve at the Union Gospel Mission dinner, and many other possibilities. Cultivate your relationships, your discipleship, and your sense of mission all at once by serving together.
Play Together I suspect that Jesus and His disciples had some pretty good times together that didn’t involve teaching or praying. Group members enjoying doing things together outside their group time is a sign of health. Even with our busy lives, we find time to play. Why not play together with some or all of our fellow group members?
• The Sims/Lochridge GROW group men take fishing trips. I think the women shop.
• The activities of choice in the group Bill Dautel and I lead are golf and quilting (No, Bill and I don’t quilt!).
• The Wagoner/Busick group takes an annual weekend retreat together.
• The Elders went on a sailboat ride. (No one walked on water.)
• Many groups party together in one form or another.
Extended, varied time together opens up many opportunities for relationship and discipleship. Be careful not to dichotomize “play” time from “spiritual” time. Authentic, full-fledged relationships move easily and naturally among the modes of teaching and service, prayer and play, sharing and doing.
Connect Between Meetings Community-building small groups do not spring into being for a couple hours a week and then hibernate for the rest of the week. In some ways, the meeting is just the platform on which the good stuff of Christian community surfaces. Encourage your members to let one another know they aren’t forgotten about during the week. It is amazing how one contact, gesture, or service beyond the scope of the expected interaction at a meeting can advance a relationship. Bill does a great job of communicating with the group each week through meaningful emails, which often draw responses. Following up on a prayer request, remembering a significant event, celebrating a special occasion, helping out in a practical way, or just stopping by or having a cup of coffee together once in a while communicates that the people in a small group are more important than the agenda and activities.
One of the ways I have been touched most deeply by anyone at Bethel was when someone who hadn’t even been in the group very long or met my son emailed during the week to say, “Just wanted you to know that God has put it on my heart to pray for your son every day.”
I’ve seen God accomplish a lot through a group sitting in a circle and talking, but He does much more when we allow Him to transcend the restrictions of meeting time and format.
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