Leading Your Group

Purpose & Covenant: Launching Well

You have learned to facilitate a discussion and to walk with one person. This course is about the group itself: launching it, raising someone to lead beside you, reading whether it is healthy, and pointing it outward. It starts where every good group starts, before the first meeting, with two questions the leader has to answer out loud: what is this group for, and what will we ask of each other? Groups that skip those two questions become classes, or social hours, or nothing in particular. Groups that answer them become communities. This session is about answering them well.

Opening Reflection

Think of a group you were part of that faded out. Write down, honestly, what its purpose was. If you cannot say it in one sentence, write that down too; it is probably the reason it faded.

What a Group Is For

⁴²They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. ⁴³Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. ⁴⁴All the believers were together and had everything in common. ⁴⁵They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. ⁴⁶Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, ⁴⁷praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.Acts 2:42-47 · NIV

Luke gives us the first Christian community in a single paragraph, and it is the best description of a small group in Scripture. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Four devotions, all together. They learned the Word. They shared life. They ate together and remembered Jesus. They prayed. And around those four things, something happened that no program produces: awe, generosity, glad and sincere hearts, favor with outsiders, and people being added daily.

Every group you will ever lead leans toward one or two of those devotions and neglects the others. The Bible-study group learns and forgets to pray. The friendship group shares life and forgets the Word. The prayer group intercedes and never eats together. Part of leading a group is knowing which way yours leans and leading it, on purpose, toward the whole picture. The word Luke uses is devoted. Not attended. Devoted. That level of commitment does not happen by accident, and it does not happen without a leader who names what the group is for.

Leading toward all four takes some honesty about your own preferences, because a group drifts toward its leader’s. The leader who loves the Word will spend fifty minutes on the passage and pray for two at the door. The leader who loves people will spend the evening catching up and treat the passage as an afterthought. Neither is wrong to love what they love; both are leading a group that is becoming lopsided. So audit it. Once a season, ask which of the four your group is strongest in and which it has quietly dropped, and then lead on purpose toward the weak one: a meeting that is mostly prayer, a shared meal with no agenda, a session where the passage gets the time it deserves. The first community devoted itself to all four because the apostles led it toward all four.

²⁴And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, ²⁵not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.Hebrews 10:24-25 · NIV

The writer of Hebrews gives the purpose in one line: consider how to spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, but encouraging one another. That is what a group is for. Not information, though it learns. Not friendship, though it makes friends. It exists so that people spur each other toward Christlikeness and do not give up. A group that only studies becomes a class. A group that only socializes becomes a club. Your job is to lead it toward being a community, which is both of those things aimed at something higher.

Naming the Purpose Before You Start

Here is the first practical rule of launching: the leader names the purpose and the expectations before the first meeting, so that nobody has to guess what they joined. This feels presumptuous to new leaders. Should the group not decide together? The group will shape the details, and Facilitating Small-Group Discussion showed you how to draft a covenant with them. But someone has to say, before anyone shows up, “This group exists to help us follow Jesus together, and here is what that will look like.” If you do not, the loudest person in the room will decide, or nobody will, and the group will drift.

Write it as one sentence a new member could repeat after one meeting. “We meet every other week to work through a course together, pray for each other, and help each other actually do what we are learning.” That is enough. It says what, how often, and what for. Then write three expectations you will ask everyone to agree to. Be there. Do the reading. Keep what is shared here. Those three, or your own three, are not a burden you place on people. They are how you honor them, because they tell adults what they are committing to and let them commit with their eyes open.

The First Three Meetings

¹²Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. ¹³Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. ¹⁴And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. ¹⁵Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. ¹⁶Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. ¹⁷And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.Colossians 3:12-17 · NIV

Paul tells the Colossians what a community clothed in Christ looks like: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another, forgiving, and over all of it love, with the peace of Christ ruling and the word of Christ dwelling richly as they teach and admonish one another. That is the destination. The first three meetings are where you set the direction toward it, and they are worth planning carefully, because a group forms its habits fast.

The first meeting is for belonging. Welcome people by name. Ask a story question everyone can answer, something about their life rather than their theology. Say the purpose sentence. Walk through the three expectations and ask, out loud, whether everyone can agree to them. Pray briefly, and end on time. Do not try to cover the first session of the course; the course will keep. The second meeting is for the covenant conversation, which you learned to facilitate in the Facilitating course: let the group shape how they will treat each other. The third meeting is for the first real study, and by then people know why they are there and what they have agreed to. Three meetings, and you have a group instead of a gathering.

End on time at every one of them. It is the smallest promise you make and the one people notice most. A leader who honors the clock is trusted with larger things.

Expect some resistance at the covenant conversation, and do not read it as failure. Someone will go quiet at “do the reading,” because they are already behind on everything. Someone will bristle at “keep what is shared here,” because they have been burned by a group that did not. Someone will ask whether this is really necessary. The answer is to take each one seriously rather than pushing through. Ask what the reading expectation would need to look like for it to be realistic, and adjust it in the room. Say plainly why confidentiality matters and what you will do if it is broken. Explain that the expectations exist so that people can trust each other, not so that the leader can keep score. A covenant that survived a little honest resistance is worth far more than one that was nodded through, because the group has already practiced the thing the covenant is for.