Good Things Come In Small Group Packages
I can encourage, exhort & five other words that begin with the
letter "e" to join a small group. I can give all sorts of good reasons
to do so.
But instead, for the next few minutes, I want to tell you about the things that small groups have brought into my life.
My first small group was as a teenager, when the lead singer of a
Christian band (whose life goal, I think, was to be the next Keith
Green) led an in depth Bible study for our youth group in the home of
our volunteer youth leaders. I still have the Bible I was carrying at
the time... and it's filled with notes about our studies in the letters
of Paul... and my mind is filled with memories of what it was like to
hear the Bible applied to my life.
In college, it was a music/drama group of 8 people that I ran that
became a place of safety & refuge... and the arena where I met
& befriended the guy who would end up being the best man at my
wedding as well as the first person I talked to about church planting
when God laid that vision on my heart.
Another group in college taught me the value of doing life
together over curriculum... as about half of us couldn't complete the
rigorous demands of the MasterLife discipleship notebooks we were
working through - but a wise leader encouraged us to stick with the
group and in the last few months I grew closer to Jesus even as my
notebook was missing check marks.
It was in a small group in the apartment I shared with my
(aforementioned) best friend, Tim, that we started a small group that
became my closest circle of friends - and introduced to Shari Jo, my
wife & the love of my life.
In a variety of youth ministry situations, we saw the most growth
in the lives of teenagers in small groups... where we applied the truth
of Scripture, asked & tried to answer tough questions, and prayed
for each other.
And it was in a small group on Saturday mornings where a few of us
who were struggling with our sexual addictions that I found real &
meaningful healing to cement walking away from a long-term addiction to
pornography.
Even today, Shari & I attend a monthly small group for
homeschooling parents that has helped build our walk with Jesus as well
develop friendships that make an incredible difference in our lives.
I don't want to over-promise and/or over-sell small groups - I've
been in some real clunkers: marriage groups that never actually got real about marriage, interdenominational
groups that broke down into squabbling over (unimportant) doctrinal
differences, and groups I've lead that reflected my own spiritual
immaturity & fears.
But I also don't want to under-sell small groups... because it is
obvious when I look at the history of my life that God has used them to
take me deeper with Him & into more meaningful relationships with
others.
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Quote of the Week
It's a well known fact that young adults tend to mimic the
behavior patterns of their parents once they start to have their own
families. It's amazing to see how much like their parents most kids in
my youth group eventually became. Once they hit adulthood, our
influence waned and their parents' influence held sway. They parented
like they were parented, did marriage like their parents, and even did
adult Christianity like it was modeled by most of the adults around
them.
Larry Osborne, Sticky Church
