Prepare To Share

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been leading a small-group-with-a-difference at my local church. In fact we don’t call ourselves a ‘group’ at all, but a ‘team’—the ‘Newcomers Team’. Our disciple-making focus as a group is to chase up the newcomers who roll regularly through the door on Sunday mornings. We meet each Monday night, and talk through the different people who visited the previous day. And then we phone and email them, visit them, pray for them, have them over, read the Bible with them, run a ‘Get To Know’ newcomers course for them, introduce them to a small group, and so on — basically anything that will help these new people grow in Christ by becoming linked in with our fellowship.

At the same time, we also function like any small group worth the name—that is, we read the Bible and pray together, encourage one another, catch up socially, and so on.

As part of all this, we’ve hit on an interesting way of reading and studying the Bible together in our group—one that not only integrates our small group study with the sermon on Sunday, but which helps us share with each other more encouragingly, and be ready to talk with people (especially newcomers) on Sunday more readily.

It’s a simple process that goes like this.

1. We begin our meetings each week with a 15-20 minute review from the previous week’s sermon. Each member is expected to come to the group with something to share—with an insight, an encouragement, something new they learned, a point of application, anything—that they jotted down during or after the sermon.


2. We briefly go around the group and share these points of encouragement, usually igniting plenty of discussion along the way, before praying together on the basis of what we’ve shared. (Some other prayer points are usually shared at this point as well.)


3. We then move on to talk about the ‘newcomers’ for the week, and to plan our follow-up activities. (For small groups who don’t have a ministry focus like this, this step could be replaced by more extended prayer, or a training time, or by planning some ministry together, or a coffee break!)


4. For the final 20-30 minutes of the group time, we do a Bible study on the following week’s sermon. This usually consists of four or five questions that I prepare that help the group grapple with the passage, to come up with questions they want answered, to form a view about what the main ideas and applications are, and so on. We don’t attempt to finish everything, or to apply the text to our lives. (We’ll do that the following week).


5. When I’m organized enough, I email the preacher the next day to mention some of the questions and issues that arose as we prepared the passage together (to feed into his preparation).


6. Our group then goes to church on Sunday with the passage already bubbling away in our minds. We all tend to listen to the sermon a little more actively and attentively, not only because we have prepared it, but because we know that we are going to have to share something from what we’ve learned on the following Monday night. (Our church outline also now has a box at the bottom each week saying: “What can you share with others?” to encourage the congregation to jot down the key things they learned and could talk about with someone else.)


7. As the group members mingle and talk with people over coffee on Sunday (and especially with newcomers and visitors), they find themselves ready to talk about the Bible—in particular, about the lesson or insight or encouragement that have jotted down and are ready to share.


8. We go back to point 1, and repeat.

Like all methods and processes, it’s not a magic formula, nor something you would want to use all the time. But we have found it a really useful way to encourage each other with the Scriptures. It has a number of obvious advantages:

• There are real benefits to looking at each Bible passage three times (before, during and after the sermon). We engage more, learn more and tend to retain more.


• It maximizes the effectiveness of the sermon for the group members.


• It makes it easier and more likely that the group members will talk about the sermon while at church.


• If the whole church were to do something like this, it could lead to a very productive and unity-enhancing interaction; we’re all reading and preparing the same passage together, hearing it taught together, and then speaking with one another about it.


• It sets the expectation (and supplies a simple mechanism) for an encouraging word ministry by all the congregation, at church and in the home. It makes it normal for us all to read and learn in order to share.


• The group leader still needs to to prepare and lead, and there is skill required in directing and drawing together the discussion. But this sort of method reduces the expectation that the group leader has to ‘land’ the study each week and drive the application. That role is now shared with the preacher.

Is this worth trying in your group or congregation? If so, I’d be interested to hear how it goes.

And since most things in the Christian world need a catchy name, preferably with a three-letter-acronym, let’s call this simple method PTS—Prepare To Share.