:: 2nd March Fuel

Last night we were treated to homemade enchiladas from Kimberly with help from Daniel. Nothing like a good meal to encourage lively discussion. Dinner conversations ranged from high school football stories and homecomings to new cars to outlet malls to who has the most clothes in their closets, all those good interesting conversations.

After dinner we jumped into 1 Peter, we began by sharing about various times of trial we had gone through. There was so much shared, I felt like we could have gone on for hours, yet in respect of time and people getting up the next day to go to work we wound down by 10:00.

Trials we talked about were hard church situations, relationships with people, death to those close to us, times of transition that were hard, etc.
In times like these we are reminded by Peter to set our minds on the living hope we have in Christ. We truly are strangers on this planet, awaiting fulfillment of a greater hope. We have tasted of grace here, we have tasted our inheritance as children of God, but the future holds a glorious fulfillment of our salvation and all it contains.

We began dialoging about our small gathering that could quickly be too big to be a small gathering. We value small groups of people gathering for the fellowship, the availability to get to know one another, the opportunity for spiritual gifts to be expressed. It is the fiber true community is built out of. We talked about not having rigid guidelines such as: when a group hits 12 people they have to split. On the other side of things we talked about how we needed structure to function. In the end we committed to keeping a listening ear to the Lord on these matters and ask what seems best to Him for the situation.

For our own core group the discussion went two ways. There was concern that the core team would lose continuity if we opened our small gathering to others. The concern the other way was that if we didn't open this group that new people wouldn't be as easily intertwined within the community. There was some consensus that as the small gathering grows we may need to have the core team to branch out and be facilitators at other small gatherings and that our core team would maybe meet together on a monthly basis rather than weekly.

This might seem trivial to someone reading this. You might think "Hey have you looked at the local Christian bookstore, there are hundreds of books on small groups, find a method and go with it." For us this is not trivial though. This is the journey we are on, not the journey others are on. That doesn't mean we are foolish enough not to consider the wisdom or lessons others have learned, but it does mean we want to allow our journey to unfold. We want to be on the journey together and these matters are important. They are important not just for the particular method we find to have small gatherings (small groups) but the process is important for the community of faith we are in. The process is about us being community and sharing our lives with one another. It is about the gifts of creativity coming out of people and allowing people to have input and value in the conversation. As I think about it more, this is a community conversation. Certainly we are seeking God's will as our ultimate end, but the case I would make is that God's will is found in the community of faith more than individuals seeking God on an individual level. I believe the voice of God speaks to us not for our individual gain. The voice of God has inherent in it a building up of the saints. So when the Lord speaks to you, it is for the benefit of the kingdom of God and the community of God. I can see this could quickly become a paper rather than a post so I'll stop here for now.