Last night we had our weekly community group meeting. Our community groups are aiming to do several things at once and, to attempt to accomplish something of them all, we have a fairly simple format. Here is what we do.
Eat Together
The first part of our meeting we eat together. There is something about having food that just makes people talk more freely. Whether it is having something to do or not having to stare people in the face the whole time, I don’t know. It can’t escape anyone’s notice Jesus was constantly eating with people and I think there is more to him doing that than just cultural expectations of the time. Eating together does something for our engagement with one another.
As our community groups aim at building fellowship within the body, eating together is a great way to do this. People open up as we eat. There are things that I find out, that I never would have found out, but for our chatting over food. Our fellowship is meaningfully improved as we share a meal together.
The other benefit of eating together is that we do it on a rota basis. We have a no-questions-asked opt-out system for cooking so that anyone who is unable or doesn’t want to for whatever reason doesn’t have to do so. But almost nobody makes use of it. This means almost everyone in the group serves everybody else at some point (typically on a monthly basis) while everyone else benefits from being served several times a month. It builds in a real sense of the importance of service and actively encourages servant-heartedness.
It is also worth noting that in a multicultural church like ours, you want to find opportunities for people to actively express their culture. One of the simplest ways to do this is through food. Most people, I have found, enjoy sharing their culture through food. Most people who have come to Britain want to share something of home with their brothers and sisters. Most miss the food of their homeland, just as I can imagine missing British foods that I love if I lived somewhere nobody eats them! This also helps build fellowship as we learn about other cultures just in the act of eating, we talk about other cultures as we eat and it sparks all manner of interesting intercultural chat.
Pray Together
After about 45 minutes of eating and chatting, we break into single-sex groups to pray. This is partly just pragmatic to create two smaller groups in which there is enough time to share and then pray for everyone. But it also helps some people open up in ways they might not be comfortable in a mixed-sex group.
But our approach to prayer in the group is pretty straightforward. We go round the group and ask each person what they would like prayer for. Ideally, we aim to get one thing we can pray for (a concern or something like that) and one thing we can give thanks to God for. We don’t stick rigidly to that but it is at least a nod to trying to get us away from a shopping list of stuff we want God to do and gets us to think about the many good things the Lord has done for us already. We want to at least encourage a bit of thanksgiving for God and his goodness as well as ask him to bear our burdens and work for our good in them.
Once we’ve been round our group and asked for points of prayer, as you can imagine, we then pray for them all. We actively encourage everyone to pray. We are aiming to encourage our members to meaningfully pray for each other. We are trying to model something of thanksgiving to God for who he is and all he is as well as taking our anxieties, worries and burdens to him too.
Study Together
After praying, we join together again for some time in the word. Our usual practice is to take the sermon that was preached on Sunday, re-read the passage we looked at together and – after a 1-minute summary of the key points – press further into the applications.
One of our aims here is to help people engage with the sermon throughout the week. I am under no illusion that most people will not remember every word for the sermon. If they even remember the key ideas a few days later, I think we’re doing quite well. What we are aiming to do is refresh people’s memory so these things stick a little better as well as help them engage further with the text.
On top of this, we are conscious that you cannot apply pointedly to every situation in the room. Our community group study gives us room to press further into application and more pointedly apply them to those who are there. This helps us to target more directly the actual applications that land most helpfully for our people.
Finally, community groups are a place where we can address questions. The first and most significant question we ask at the start of every study is ‘does anybody have any thoughts, observations, questions or criticisms of what they heard in the sermon?’ This allows us to find out what people took away, what they heard, what they understood (or, didn’t understand, as the case may be). It allows us to address the points left unaddressed that people wondered about and to resolve misunderstandings. It allows for some essential feedback on what was heard in the sermon and what was not.
So, these are the key things we are aiming to do with our community groups. We generally pack all this in to about 2 hours (ours runs from 7pm-9pm). I am sure we don’t accomplish any of our aims perfectly. But we think this provides a generally helpful approach to achieving a number of these things.