If you are a servant leader of a small prayer group, imagine the following scenario where your meetings with your small group are intentionally scripture-focused. You actually begin to call your meetings “bible study” meetings. It’s not you acting as preacher to them. Rather, you facilitate the discussion and meeting activity around scripture-based topics.
I believe that if you are able to lead your group into what I call “scripture-focused” discussions, then the Lord will bless you with highly engaged and inspired meetings that come alive, that become nourishing and life-giving. Once your members gather together and engage in God-centered and scripture-based discussions, then your coming together takes on a different dimension and character. It would be set apart (as in “holy”) from a simple social gathering and fellowship that you would tend to have with them. And if you do this regularly and intentionally each time you gather, then your members have something to look forward to, and something to take home with them. Your group would then experience what it means to “delight in the Lord”.
Learning How to Do It
In consultation with the District Leadership Team of Central B District of Ang Ligaya ng Panginoon Community, I have begun to put together this series of lessons, which I call “THIRST-DAY BIBLE STUDY SERIES“. The aim of this THIRST-DAY SERIES is to equip you, as the discipler/leader of that small group, with tools and practical tips that you can easily use during your meetings — with intent to bless everyone with God’s word.
The aim of our THIRST-DAY SERIES is to equip our pastoral leaders with a variety of tools, tips, techniques, exercises and guides in order to have “scripture-focused” discussions during their regular small group meetings.
By the way, we call it “Thirst-Day” because we initially agreed that we would meet on Thursday evenings for these lessons. And as one of the participants cited from Psalm 63:1, “O God, You are my God, earnestly I seek You, my soul thirsts for You, my flesh faints for You, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
In this series, I will steer away from teaching you how to conduct the rigorous bible study method that involves hours of individual study and research to prepare for the sessions. While there is great value in this approach to study, it may not be for everyone, all the time. After all, there are many ways that one can have an engaging discussion about God’s word, that leaves the participants nourished, convicted and inspired.
Therefore, what I want to share with you by way of tips, exercises, and assignments, are a number of simple techniques and discussion approaches that you can apply that will enrich your interactions, your individual and communal prayers, your worship, your gatherings, and your mentoring and discipling.
What we will be doing
You should view these Thirst-day sessions with the following learning objective: what can I do during my small group meeting so that we can have scripture-focused discussions? What topics can we take up? And what study activity can we do so that it will bear the following FRUIT: Scripture-based insights, reflections, resolutions, prayers and even worship.
What I will therefore attempt to accomplish in our Thirst-day Series sessions is to recommend a bunch of study tools, discussion activities and topics that we will try out together. Then, we can together improve on the design of the learning activity so that we can then document it, and you can begin to share it in our group meetings (aka bible study meetings).
Of course, during our Thirst-day sessions and exercises, not only shall we learn discussion facilitation approaches. We shall actually practice them among ourselves, and therefore we shall be able to generate meaningful scripture-based insights, reflections, resolutions and prayers ourselves through these activities … the kind of fruit that we expect you will bear once you cascade these techniques during your own group meetings.
Three final notes:
First, this is work-in-progress. I am actually conducting this series for the first time live as we speak. And so, you will have to keep returning here for fresh new materials. I post the lessons here in this website, even as I would either conduct the lessons via zoom synchronously, or via YouTube video and this site asynchronously.
Second, I call this a “series”, because I envision that there will be a beginning and an end to this. Exactly how long it will be, I leave it to God for now. But what I do anticipate is that my learners will discover that they can actually already begin to create their own variants and techniques for scripture-focused discussions. When that happens, then I know my mission is accomplished.
Lastly, the tips and techniques that I share here are not all my own creation. in fact, most of it I pick up from what I learned others do, or from very helpful websites and blogs. What I do offer is a single place where you can learn various methods, where you can direct other fellow leaders to go, and also where you can return to, for occasional refreshers. An added feature here is that I invite my fellow learners to share their thoughts, experiences and tips in a forum that I shall create in the near future.
May God bless us all.
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