I just want to take a moment and share with you that I am hearing reports from group members and leaders that God is changing lives in our small groups right now. Addictions are being broken, sin is being exposed and fought against, and groups are experiencing increasing levels of depth in their relationships. It appears the freeing power of the gospel is taking root in the community of saints that is the Summit Church. My own small group is among those who have had our best weeks recently. I apologize for being so vague in my celebration here but you understand I am protecting privacy and what not.
I started to write here my observations for what led to this increase in life change. Then I remembered, you dont program for life change as much as you pray for it. God, via his Holy Spirit, seems to have rested upon the Summit Church family and begun an act of communal sanctification that recalls me to the early church and Paul’s teaching on the church throughout the NT. I will say simply, I am exceedingly grateful to be a part of the movement of God happening in our midst. SummitLIFE small group leaders, your role is the most significant one we have here. I hope you humbly submit your role before God daily and ask that he continue changing lives as he is doing now.
Books and the internet are awesome. If you are a small group leader you likely have a dilemma: you want to be a better small group leader, but probably dont have the time to do anything but google “small group leader tips” and click on something that ends up educating you on how to facilitate a focus group in your new product line. Or, you wind up on amazon needing to buy a book to find out the answers. Well, your small groups guy is here to help. I hope. What I am going to try and do today (and maybe every monday) is give you some targeted, always free, materials to help you grow as a follower of Jesus. Some of these will be specific to the small group world and some will be more general discipleship oriented. Sermons, interviews, book reviews, articles, blogs, and videos are all in play.
To remind you, the better version of Monday on the links is my partner in small group ministry: The Small Group Exchange, linked over on the right. Likely some of the links I give you each week will direct you to a resource on their site.
Here we go. Today I want to deal with developing an effective, gospel-centered version of your encounter with Jesus. So many people in our small groups likely have never shared their story with anyone before, and others in there may not be Christians. What I hope the resources below do is help equip a small group to train one another and encourage one another with your individual encounters with Jesus. Our small groups at the Summit are doing this exercise this week. If you lead at the Summit, let me know how it is going!
Developing your story(resource by Summit Small groups Staff): a guide to writing a 3-5 minute version of your story.
Experience AND Evidence (blog by Summit Pastor Danny Franks): reflection on sermon from 04.05.09 which discussed how you balance your personal story and the truth claims of christianity. His sermon is linked on that blog.
Share your Journey(video by Author & Small groups pastor Bill Self): Broadens out to your life story, and gives a great challenge to small group leaders.
Below is a video we showed at the Summit this past Sunday. Whether you have already seen it or not, I encourage you to watch it. We are talking right now in our church about how the Gospel of Jesus Christ is truly life changing. And that life-change is happening right here in our midst. This video tells just some of those stories that are here at the Summit Church. I know there are more out there, and more to come as well!
If you visited this post earlier today you saw the html chaos that attempted an overtake. in the end I won, and instead of watching the video here, click on the link below to watch it on the Summit’s website:
Below is an example of what the Summit is planning to do in the coming days. Ours will not be live. Our media team is filming this in advance and all those that are participating needs to come by the Brier Creek church lobby Wednesday February 4th or Thursday February 5th from 6-8.
