Would you like to join a group to better know God, others and yourself?
We have a variety of groups meeting in homes around the Parish each week. Most meet during week days, either in the morning or evening, and meet on a weekly or fortnightly basis. These meetings are held at various venues to facilitate ease of access.
You will be welcome at any of these home groups, where we open the Bible together, seeking to apply its truths to our daily lives, supporting each other in living the Christian life and praying for each others’ needs and for our world and community. We seek in some measure to fulfil what the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer described in his classic Life Together: "The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them....I can no longer condemn or hate a brother [or sister] for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he/she causes me. His/her face that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed through intercession into the countenance of a brother/sister for whom Christ died".
In the same light read what Reverend Howard Snyder has called Authentic Fellowship:
Each group is free to choose the study series it wants to do but during some times of the year, like the season of Lent before Easter, all groups use one study.
Some of our Home Group meeting times:
Monday Carlyle Gardens 7:30pm
Tuesday Kirwan 7:30 pm
Tuesday Deeragun (Northern Beaches) 1.00 pm
Wednesday Heatley 9:30am
Wednesday St James' Village, Heatley 9:30 am
Wednesday Vincent 7:30 pm
Friday Kirwan 7:30 pm
Some of our groups are currently in recess but will be starting up during the month of February. If you are interested in sharing in the lives of other Christians as we journey together please contact our church office or the Rector on 0457 712 289.
We will be doing a study written by our Bishop, Bill Ray, called Faith Rudder, starting on the week beginning Monday the 27th of February. This study will be based on the Old Testament readings for the season of Lent. After Easter, the Rector proposes a 6 part study and reflection up to Pentecost written by the Task Force on Mission of the General Synod of the Anglican Church in Australia called Time to grow: doing church differently.
Find out more about this vital aspect of our Christian Life by clicking on the hyper link below, which will take you to a great book by the Reverend John Mallison.
Home group leaders will find his book a great encouragement and a wonderful resource.
The Australian church owes a great debt to John Mallison. His pioneering and development work with the small-group movement in this country has been invaluable. Once again John has produced in this book new and updated resources for small groups. As always they are Christ-centred, focused on growing disciples, and very practical. This is an indispensable resource for every group leader and program coordinator.
The Rev Peter Corney, for many years Senior minister, St Hilary's Anglican Church, Kew, Victoria.
Small Groups and Smaller Groups:
Fellowship doesn’t have to be hard
by Andrew Bowles
The purpose of a fellowship ministry is to help people to make genuine connections with other Christians that will enable God to work in their lives. God almost always helps us through other people, rather than zapping us directly with spiritual power from on high. One Christian author puts it this way: People are God’s ‘Plan A’ for doing his work. If Christians aren’t in fellowship with each other, then they’re missing out on the number one way that God offers his people help to grow and live well.
Small groups are one of the strongest factors of our church. What I’m going to argue is that we need to expand our ideas of what effective small group ministry actually is so that this remains the case.
Small Groups
We generally think of a Small Group as a gathering of about 8-12 people who meet once a week, fortnightly, or monthly, to talk about what’s going on in their life, study the Bible and pray together. Doing these things regularly is an extremely powerful way for people to get connected to others and get the help that God’s offering. But are there any downsides to this Small Group model? There are a few:
Endless organising: Where should the group be? Who’s preparing the study? Can we carpool? What food do I need to bring?
Pressure on leaders: Small group leaders, even if they’re dedicated and motivated, find it a strain to bear the responsibility for the spiritual growth of a whole group of people, and for making the group run smoothly.
Inactive members: There are a significant number of people who hide in Small Groups and never really find a way to make the jump to a committed and dynamic discipleship. Sitting in church for an hour a week and sitting in a small group for another couple of hours doesn’t automatically produce spiritual growth.
Inertia: Even exciting and energetic groups generally slow down and lose energy after a few months. We get bogged down into comfortable routines.
These are real problems, and any small group leader will admit that (if you get them alone and there’s no possibility that their group members will hear them). I think that our fellowship ministry has become very attached to this model as the only real way to ‘do fellowship’ at church.
Smaller Groups
In my experience, the most genuine, dynamic Christian interaction happens when 2 or 3 people who are genuinely motivated to grow spiritually just sit down and talk to each other. Most of the really good ministry that happens in churches comes about when a couple of people who have a good idea encourage each other to make it happen. These are not Small Groups as we traditionally think of them: I would call them Smaller Groups.
For fellowship purposes, there are many ways in which a Smaller Group can be better than a Small Group.
Better sharing: It’s easier to talk about things that matter or are troubling you when you’re talking to just a couple of people that you trust, rather than a group of people that you may not know very well (especially if some of them are of the opposite sex). If you’re like me, you often just want to take off the social mask and be who you are. In a Smaller Group, that’s so much easier to do.
You can’t hide in a Smaller Group: If you’re talking with one or two friends, you will almost inevitably be engaged in the interaction. It’s very hard to avoid dealing with challenges to your spiritual growth if there’s only one other person in the room.
Flexibility: People can usually manage to meet a friend for coffee quite easily. When your fellowship group is just you and one or two others, the headaches of having to constantly compare diaries and organise group meetings just to have fellowship don’t bother you. You can also talk about whatever you want, without having to be boxed in to doing the three-month studies on Obadiah that your group wants to do.
Witnessing: If you’ve got a friend who is interested in Jesus, if you can introduce them to a small and very non-threatening fellowship group then that can be a great transition to the big bad world of congregational worship.
Easy multiplication: When your group’s only got two or three people, it’s easy to multiply it; all you need is one other person! Then you have two Smaller Groups of two people. Numerical growth along these lines is easier to see, easier to do, and doesn’t require the constant energy input that you need to keep people coming along to a Small Group.
Small Groups AND Smaller Groups
Nothing that I’ve said should be interpreted to be meaning that I think we should scrap the Small Group system and change it all to a loose, disorganised structure of Smaller Groups. What I’m arguing for is an expansion of our fellowship ministry to encourage Smaller Groups as a genuine option for Christians who are looking for fellowship.
I think we need to make room in our thinking for the fact that for many people, and in many circumstances, a Smaller Group is going to be preferable for them to achieve the goals of a fellowship ministry: to give and receive God’s blessing through other people. A Smaller Group is not a second-rate version of the real thing, it is the real thing. We should be encouraging people and setting them free to do it if that’s what they want. This then frees up Small Group ministry for those people who are genuinely committed to this type of meeting and who are doing it for a purpose that they can be committed to.
How Would this Model Work in Practice?
If Smaller Groups took off in any (Ed) church, most people would have their regular, committed fellowship time with one or two others from church or their wider friendship group. This would be the accepted method for getting fellowship done at our church.
A typical Smaller Group meeting would probably consist of:
Sharing of personal stories, concerns and thanksgiving
Confession of sin and receiving of forgiveness
Reading through a passage of Scripture together and talking about its meaning and implications
Supporting each other in the regular disciplines of praying, meditating, reading the bible, studying Christian truth, and attending worship services.
Offering practical service to each other and others that are not part of the group
Praying for each other and pre-Christian (Ed) friends
If a number of people in Smaller Groups decide that they want to work through a particular course or get a particular task done, then a Small Group could be formed for that specific purpose. For instance, a number of people may want to do a course in discovering and using their spiritual gifts, so they form a Small Group while they do this and then finish the group after the course is over.
Of course, people who want to continue meeting only in Small Groups should be encouraged to do this. There is a need for Small Groups for people for whom a Smaller Group is not appropriate.
Getting Started
Smaller Groups are easy to start. There are only three steps.
1. Find at least one other person who you want to meet with for fellowship.
2. Meet with them.
3. Repeat Steps 2 & 3 as often as you want.
They’re also easy to finish, without the long, drawn-out process that often accompanies the demise of a Small Group.
Encouraging Smaller Groups at any (Ed) church would be as simple as just talking about it in the Small Groups and at church. Once people get a taste for this type of fellowship they will probably get started.
Support for Smaller Groups
The benefit of having people meeting in Smaller Groups is that it takes pressure off the church leadership to provide as much oversight for group leaders. Smaller Groups manage themselves. However, people should be able to access church resources and the expertise of other ministry teams when they need to. The role of social and fellowship events and special meetings would be more prominent if more people were in Smaller Groups.
