Walking with Jesus

How to use them

Three people are working this book at once

You will very likely have someone still deciding about Jesus, someone recently committed, and someone with decades of church behind them, in the same room. The chapters are written for all three deliberately.

The consequence for you is small and constant: say which reading is on offer before a chapter that could be heard as a verdict. It costs nothing with the believers present and is the entire difference between a seeker staying and going.

Tell them in week one how the class ends

Announce at the very first session what the last one will and will not contain, and then keep your word for nine weeks. People arrive braced for a meeting that turns, and a room that is braced is reading you rather than the passage.

The single sentence that buys you the most is that nothing in these nine chapters is the price of belonging to the group. Say it in week one, when it costs nothing, rather than in week seven, when it sounds like a manoeuvre.

What replaces the appeal is the dated commitment at the end of four chapters, and that is a different instrument entirely: the person writes it, the person chooses it, and you only ever ask what happened.

Your honesty is the ceiling

Four chapters ask people to say something true about themselves, and in every one of them the room’s answer will not exceed yours. So you go first — and you decide before you walk in exactly how far you will go.

Both failures are common. Too little and you licence a room of abstractions. Too much and the session becomes about you, which is worse, because everybody else’s answer then feels either trivial or competitive.

Small, true and current is the right size.

Written commitments, or the class was a book they read

Chapters 1, 2, 5 and 9 end with something dated. Take those down in your own book as they are given.

Chapter 9 opens by asking what actually happened, and that question is worthless if nobody remembers what was promised. The group also learns from this — early, and from what you do rather than what you say — whether commitments made here are followed up or quietly forgotten.

Silence, and where you must not fill it

Chapter 6 needs more silence than any leader is comfortable with. After the second reading of Isaiah 53, do not speak for a minute or two. Nearly every leader breaks first, and always for their own comfort rather than the group’s.

The same restraint applies wherever someone has just said something costly. Receive it and move on without commentary.

Nobody leaves the last session without a name and a day

That final exercise is the only one that decides whether any of this travels beyond the nine people in your room. Do not close the last session until every person has both, written down.

Using the two books

The workbook is the participant’s: a short lead-in, the questions, and the space to write. Print it front-and-back for a binder.

The leader book is that plus the whole teaching and the facilitator layer — per-chapter timing, what to prepare, what to watch for, and a note on every question. Keep it open in front of you during the session. It carries material that is not in the participant book, so hand out the workbook, never this one.