the    sides

I had lunch the other day with Jim Wilson, the small group/teaching pastor at Fellowship Bible Church, Conway. In the ongoing attempt to move folks from congregation/large group to small group/community, he’s given up on the guilt trip.

In other words - to say and communicate from up front that you don’t belong if you aren’t in worship and a small group doesn’t really endear or encourage people to get involved. If anything, it insults them and could be a huge discouragement as to where they are on their own spiritual journey.

As Jim was saying this, I was reminded of marko leaving his own church because of a similiar thing - insulting those who are on the journey. Unfortunately, I was also reminded of my own words in the not so distant past.

Jim brought the need for 4 places - just from a sociological point of view.

A public place - celebration/crowd arena.
A social place - a place to hang and get to know
A personal place - a place to let the guard down and be real
An intimate place - a place to be completely undone and vulnerable.

I was already racing ahead in my convo with Jim. If those are the 4 places that people live - as a church (Grace particularly) we are just aiming at 2, hoping that one of them leads to a 3rd.

Furthermore - we don’t see those things as a journey - we see them as slots to fill. I’m not sure that’s healthy either.

Now here are my first thoughts about all of this….

1. I think Life Groups can be a personal place in which our intimate place exists. (You find your lifewalking crew inside your Life Group.)

2. We (Grace) are doing a pretty cruddy job of social places. I do think they are needed - times to hang and laugh and play and eat and celebrate.

3. I think the key is have places for folks to plug in at whatever level they feel comfortable in - but the goal is to move towards an intimate place (transformational living).

Over the next week, i’m going to try to unpack each of these places in our church setting.

The real hard part will come after that - implementing those ideas!!