How to use them
This class does not work in the abstract
Every chapter asks about specific groups, specific facilitators, specific
touchpoints. A room that cannot name a real group or a real person is not ready
for this class, and no amount of good discussion will change that.
Find that out in session one rather than session five. If nobody can name
anybody, the honest move is to stop and go find out who is meeting nearby — that
is a better use of the term than eight sessions of hypotheticals.
Do not let them hurry past the celebration
Chapter 1 asks a room of church leaders to praise God for something they did not
start and do not control. Most rooms give that about ninety seconds and move to
strategy.
That hurry is the instinct the chapter is correcting. Slow it down deliberately,
say your own praise sentence first, and get one from every person out loud. A
room that has not genuinely rejoiced will spend the next seven chapters managing
a problem instead of coming alongside a work of God.
Three chapters hand the room an instrument, and each one can be turned the wrong
way round.
Chapter 2’s list of what a congregation offers is a description of your church —
not a rubric for scoring the groups. Chapter 3’s touchpoint audit collapses if
every line comes back “alongside”; the way to reopen it is to ask what an over
would even look like on one of these items, and whatever they describe is the
standard they have been grading against. And
chapter 4’s practices are usually well-meant and often decades old, so expect
defensiveness and treat it as information rather than resistance.
Two related traps. False modesty in chapter 2: a pastor who cannot name anything
his congregation has to give will keep giving nothing, and these disciples need
some of it. And, everywhere in the class, softening the manner while leaving the
structure alone — a friendly tone on top of a reporting line is still a reporting
line.
Chapter 6 is the one that can do damage
The danger of bringing them in too soon is the most easily misquoted chapter in
the class. Repeated at second hand without its second half, it is what leaves a
family believing there are two grades of member here.
Three things hold it in place. Work out how you say the culture-not-people
distinction before anybody asks you for it: improvised under pressure it lands
as exclusion, and you do not get that back. Keep it as a decision about pace
that you hold, never a doctrine a group is taught. And make sure it has an exit
— a group protected indefinitely has quietly become a second congregation, and
chapter 7 is the exit, not an optional extra.
One thing, done, with a person and a day
Chapter 5 offers five ways to partner and the room will want all five. Ask for
one, carried through — five committed to on a whiteboard is the very outcome the
chapter was written to head off.
The same discipline closes the class. Chapter 8 collects the commitments
written in chapters 5, 6 and 7 — re-read them before that session or you waste
the close. Watch for final answers pitched at churches in general rather than at
this one — that version is comfortable to give and changes nothing on Monday.
Nobody leaves until they have said who they will ask, and on which day.
Using the two books
The workbook is the participant’s: short lead-in, the questions, the space to
write. Print it front-and-back for a binder.
The leader book is this one plus the whole teaching and the facilitator layer
— per-chapter timing, what to prepare, and what to watch for. Keep it open in
front of you during the session. It carries answers and notes that are not in the
participant book, so hand out the workbook, never this.
