Monday Night Small Group
Ok, it’s Monday night. Where did your sermon go? Do you know where your listeners from yesterday are 
and what they are doing? Did they leave church with a big idea from your message? (or did you leave with a big idea from the passage your pastor used?) I don’t think all that work you did last week should go to waste, do you?
What if you had a Monday Night Small Group that unpacked further the text and focused strategically on application. If you were to look at a preacher’s sermon notes you would see that application is usually not given the same amount of space in as is “explanation” and “illustration” of the text. Application is usually short changed and left to the Holy Spirit. Now of course I’m not against that, but most preachers use that as a way getting out of working the application. (I will post later on how the questions would be developed) What would this look like on a Monday night?
1. The small group meets from 6-8pm.
2. The small group would eat together at the group leader’s house.
3. Kids come to the meeting.
4. For the first 30 minutes, the group saunters in to eat, fellowship, connect.
5. The next 45-60 minutes are spent using questions to further the big idea of the passage from Sunday.
6. The final 20-30 minutes are used either for praying and ministry to one another and/or planning a ministry or missions project.
7. The group has no more than 12 people in it (following Jesus small group example)
8. The group would agree by written covenant to practice the “one anothers” of scripture. (For example, the group would not need to have a staff person from a church to come to the hospital for a group member. The group would do it. People are trained to do it. Prayer would happen through the group. If someone needed money, the group! Friends? The group! etc. Also, at the beginning, it’s agreed that within 18-24 months the group will birth a new group so more who are not in a small group can be assimilated into a group)
In this model, you would not go to a Sunday School class on a campus (possible hole here…do you see it?). And you would only do other events in your church life that you think are essential to your spiritual growth. Everything else would flow out of you sermon-based small group. All other focus on life would be doing life and connecting to the lost.
What do you think of this sermon-based small group model for spiritual growth? What holes can you pick in the process?
September 22, 2008 at 10:48 pm
new book by larry Osborne, The Sticky Church, is about how north coast church uses sermon based small groups – so it shows it can work quite well
September 23, 2008 at 1:03 pm
This is how we do application at Fellowship Family Church. The only difference is that our small groups meet at random days/times. It works well and members don’t feel like they spend to much time at the church.
September 24, 2008 at 3:10 am
djchuang,
I am going to attend the Sticky Church Conference in a week or so. I’ll pick up the book then.