Different churches have different names for their midweek groups that tend to meet in homes. Some call them home groups, others pastoral care groups, others still call them midweek meetings or small groups. We run with community groups but, to all intents and purposes, these are all the same thing. They’re smaller meetings of the church that meet in homes midweek to look at the bible and pray together.
Along with the range of possible names (quite a lot of other names have also been used), there seems to be a fairly broad way of using them in the life of the church. None of these different ways, it bears saying, are in the Bible. That isn’t to say any of them are wrong so much as none of them can be mandated as definitively right. Indeed, before anyone writes in, home groups aren’t in the Bible altogether so if you don’t fancy them at all, there is no compulsion. But for those of us who think they’re more helpful than not, I think it can be helpful to think about how and why we run ours the way we do.
Food
We always eat at our community groups. Jesus seemed to think food was important and that eating with people was useful. I definitely think there is something about the way people open up when they’re eating that they just don’t do when they’re sat looking at you. So, we always begin our time together with some food.
Not only does it help conversation flow, but most people end up serving everyone some of the time. We usually have a rota and around once per month (maybe a bit less) most people take a turn to cook for everyone. This means everyone has a chance to serve and be served. We also get to try out a range of different people’s cuisine, which is always fun and nice and easy way to connect culturally.
Chat
Over food, we chat. Not about anything especially “spiritual” (such as we want to divide up life that way: everything is spiritual!) We just chat. We have a laugh and we listen to each other. This gives us an opportunity to hear about what is going on with each other informally. It helps us grow more comfortable with one another, particularly the more we come regularly. All of this helps when it comes to our Q&A time in the bible later on. The more comfortable we are with one another the less worried we’re going to be about answering the bible questions in front of our friends.
Pray
After food, we break into single-sex groups to pray. This is mainly pragmatic. We have to split the group in order to fit in time for everyone to pray and be prayed for so this is an easy way to split the group. But also, it can be easier for some to share in single-sex spaces in a way they might not be comfortable in mixed-sex settings and perhaps not in larger groups.
Once we break into two groups, we go round and ask one another points for prayer. Again, this is a good way to hear what is going on with each other and to pray meaningfully about it. It also helps more of us learn how to pray well. There is more opportunity to pray in a smaller group and, by hearing the prayers of those who have been praying much longer than we have, we learn to pray well ourselves.
We try and encourage everyone to think of at least one point for prayer and one point for praise. That way, we’re not just reeling off our requests to God but we are encouraging us to be more active in thankfulness. But we’re not so scared of the prosperity gospel that we don’t want to ask God for anything at all and we fool ourselves into thinking that he doesn’t care about the minutiae of our lives (Jesus gave a little picture about sparrows and flowers to make clear God cares about the little things we worry about). So, we find out the various things concerning us, and then we pray about them.
Revisit Scripture
After we have prayed for each other, we come back together for our bible study. But we don’t look at a new passage of scripture, instead we pick up what we heard on Sunday. This does a few things for us.
First, we spend much less time on the ‘what does this say?’ observation questions and the ‘what does this mean?’ questions because we covered them off on Sunday. Instead, we devote more time to the ‘if what was said on Sunday is true and is what this means, what does it mean more specifically for us here?’ question.
Second, given that focus, we spend more time on not only what legitimate application from the text looks like, but pressing into the specific implications of the text for us. Rather than some more generalised applications from a sermon, we can focus on even more specific applications.
Third, revisiting the same passage means we are more likely to actually remember it. I am pleased if people remember almost any of my sermons shortly after the fact. I’m amazed when people remember chunks a week later. I do not expect almost anyone to remember any of it 6 months afterwards. Revisiting the same passage on Sunday helps us to cement what we have learnt and to retain more of what the passage has to say.