What a typical month would look like

What might a typical month look like?:

I’m presenting this now with the understanding that this is just an idea I’m trying to develop.  I truly want a church community to be something that you and I can join and it will change our lives, not just our Sunday experience.  So please take a look and give me some feedback as to the effectiveness you see this working with and the tweaks you would see this needing.  I value your opinion, that is why you know about this blog.

Overarching Theme:

All things would need to be something that is looked at as a group or community that isn’t the same for the rest of your life.  But rather it is a group that would multiply.  That is how the movement works.  If we all want to find a community of friends and never want it to grow, we are going to be a hindrance to God’s Kingdom moving forward.  So we must enter all we do with the purpose and hope of it multiplying.  I don’t know exactly how that will look yet.  I know some people have a concern with small groups changing, but they would rather keep them the same because they want to grow really deep in relationships with some people.  I understand this, and this is a concern I’m not sure exactly where God is leading in at this point.  But I do know without multiplication, our community doesn’t produce life.

Community Gathering:

We would have a weekly meeting time.

Week One: If we were going to go over Matthew, we would have a meeting time that looks typical in that we would meet for a person to give some extensive background information teaching about Matthew and then have some musical worship time.

Week Two: We could have a community worship experience that would be based on living out the teachings from Matthew in Greeley. i.e. In Matthew 9:13 Jesus says he prefers mercy over sacrifice.  So we gather as a group to show another group mercy.  Like going to the downtown park and feeding the hungry. 

Week Three: Some type of artistic type experience around Matthew

Week Four: This is community day.  It is a gathering of all LTGs and allowing them to mix up and share what they learned and experienced from Matthew

LTGs:

The groups of 3 to 5 people would meet each week.  After they listen to the background information about Matthew, they then read all of Matthew each week for the rest of the month and discuss it in their group.

They also have accountability with each other

They pray for friends of theirs

Possibly they do one active role in the community like our week two of the community time, but they do it as an LTG.

Cultural Engagment:

This would be things like The Farm, the cultural café, inviting friends (very important that you have a relationship with these people) to your LTG or one of the action days.

 

Please leave some comments about what you think of this idea.  This is something I want us to develop as a community which means we all need to help form it.  Just to give you an idea of when this would begin, we are looking at late August or early September.

Experimentation Group

As we begin this journey, we have to recognize a very important detail.  This is so new to our society and culture (around Greeley anyway) we need to do some actions that will really be experimental in all reality.  One of the things we are really looking to figure out is how best to grow people in their understanding of the Bible.  I feel as though I went through a time in my life when I only felt I could learn when a senior pastor provided me a lesson on Sunday with a good story and how this is applicable to my life.  Now, I feel that has been great and I even feel as though one of my gifts is to teach in that capacity (transparent thought: it is scary to put out to the public something I think I’m ‘gifted’ at because others may think I’m an idiot.) But I’m not convinced this is the best structure to use when you want people to take resonsibility for their growth as opposed to having it ‘spoon feed’ to them.

Therefore, we are developing and researching other ideas of giving people the opportunity to feed themselves (The whole teach them how to fish, not just give them a fish idea.)  We are starting these groups with the hopes of people giving their best insights into the good and bad of different ideas and helping develop some new ways to grow spiritually.  If you are interested in hearing what these ideas are and being a developmental/experimental group, please email me at jeff@ridethefarm.com  Thanks.

Love, the Neels