Setting the meeting

They said yes. Now there is a meeting to arrange, and a handful of small decisions that matter more than they look.

In person or online — whichever they can actually reach

Both work. A phone screen with two faces on it opens the same Bible as a kitchen table, and for a working mother with no transport it may be the only version of this that ever happens.

Let the seeker’s real life decide. Ask which is easier for them, and then make that one easy. If it is a video call, keep it short and expect the first few minutes to be spent on the connection, as it always is.

The rules that do not bend

Three standing rules govern every follow-up of this kind, and none of them is a judgment on anyone:

• Same-gender pairings. Men follow up with men, women with women.
• Semi-public places. A porch, a courtyard, a shop with tables, a living room with other family at home. Not an empty house.
• No money changes hands. Not lent, not given, not received.

These are not a lack of trust in the seeker. They protect the seeker as much as they protect you, and they protect the study itself from becoming about something else. If a meeting cannot satisfy all three, it does not get quietly bent — it gets handed to someone for whom it can.

That is not a failure. It is one of the ordinary reasons a contact moves from one disciple maker to another, and it happens without drama.

What to bring

Very little, on purpose.

A Bible, paper or on your phone. Coffee, if you are meeting somewhere you can offer it. That is genuinely all. No printed lesson, no study guide, no booklet from anywhere. Anything you carry in that they could not get themselves quietly raises the bar for the thing you are teaching them to do — and the whole point is that they could do this next week without you.

Leave the church-branded material at home too. Not because there is anything wrong with it, but because it answers a question they did not ask.

What to promise, out loud

Before anything else happens, say what this is. In your own words, keeping the substance exactly:

“This is not a class. This is not a church. It’s a conversation around the Bible.”

Then keep that promise for the whole hour. It is the most important thing you will say, and every choice in the next chapter exists to protect it.

Say how long it will take — about an hour — and then actually finish in about an hour. A study that runs long teaches them that this is a bigger commitment than they agreed to, and they will weigh the second invitation against the wrong number.

Confirm, and expect to reschedule

Send a short message the day before. Not to check up on them — to make it easy.

“Looking forward to tomorrow at four. Still good for you?”

And when they cancel, take it at face value the first time. Life in most of the world is genuinely disruptable: shifts change, children get sick, buses do not come. A cancelled first meeting is not a soft no; it is a Tuesday. Offer another day, warmly, once.

If a second one falls through with no counter-offer, read it the way the last chapter said to read it, and leave the door open.

Then get ready for the meeting itself — which is the next chapter, and which is simpler than you are probably expecting.