Community Connection for our Group Members

5 Responses to “Community Connection for our Group Members”

1. Elaine McConaghy says:

   November 3, 2009 at 8:09 pm

   I agree with the above sen­ti­ments, that not too many can add to their lives, but we do need to work smarter. I’ve been encour­aging my group for some time to be inten­tional about all we do & people we meet through the week. As well we have “Yes we Care Day” con­tacts from Joyce that we each visit.As an older group, this works for us. We also have a couple of lunches each year & invite unsaved friends & have a speaker or last time we watched louie Giglio dvd & chat­ted about that.
   We have wondered though about doing some­thing like Alpha in the mix. Maybe that would work on the altern­ate wk???

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2. Martin Lombard says:

   November 5, 2009 at 2:39 pm

   Agree with all three principles. 

   The chal­lenge is the pace and sequence of meet­ings and events so that these do not become a bur­den but rather enable effect­ive con­nec­tion out­side the church, really con­nect­ing and adding value to the com­munity, incl small group min­istry; and to train and develop lead­ers for tomor­row. We are all over­whelmed with the “tyranny of the urgent” and get con­sumed with all that hap­pens in life (work, busi­ness, fam­ily, kids sport, incl the 100kms we drive every week, etc). So how can we as lead­ers cre­ate space to con­nect mean­ing­fully, ensure emo­tional, spir­itual and phys­ical con­nec­tion and good bal­ance for all. Here are a few thoughts: 

   1. Think from the out­side in: we are to be the light of the world, not hid­den under a bucket (Matt 5: 13 to 16 Mes­sage). Be real but per­son­ally con­nec­ted at com­munity events; strike up con­ver­sa­tions to invite people home for tea or a bbq or an organ­ised kbc camp­ing / cyc­ling /sport event with kids. i.e. creat space where people can break out of their routines and busy­n­ess, be social with them in a relaxed envir­on­ment where they can see ‘how we live’ and reach the unreached through friend­ship. If our kids con­nect with their kids, we will con­nect with them. This approach will require all us being far more inten­tional but without pres­sure, just make friends and they will see we are real, but con­nect in their world: sport events, com­munity events, camp­ing, fish­ing, knit­ting, mom– baby/ tod­dlers. Get­ting the small group and oth­ers to pray for these cas­ual meet and greet / friend­ship events will be cru­cial. Our intent should be genu­ine, i.e. how to make a pos­it­ive con­tri­bu­tion to their lives, not a JW or Mor­mon apprach

   2. Free up the mem­bers: Less is more. More meet­ings will not add more value, rather the qual­ity and pur­pose of the meet­ings should become the attractor pat­tern. Small groups every two weeks works well, if longer the group lose con­nec­tion and some min­istry / per­sonal needs are not seen to. How­ever, groups should have the flex­ib­il­ity to switch between meet­ing as a group and being involved in events lis­ted in no 1 above. The group stag­nates when it becomes insu­lar and do not grow through adding new people and / or oppor­tun­ity to reach out to oth­ers. It is in giv­ing and mak­ing pos­it­ive con­tri­bu­tions to oth­ers that a group grows. Over the last year we have gone through a ‘mul­tilic­a­tion pro­cess’ when the group grew rather fast and some mem­bers wanted to main­tain the intim­acy of a smal­ler group. This was rather pain­ful for some as close friend­ships were chal­lenged and deep ques­tions asked about exclus­ive­ness. The ulti­mate res­ult: new mem­bers are join­ing, the group is grow­ing (again) and new min­istry io tak­ing place, i.e. people are grow­ing, even if it is painful

   3. More train­ing and sup­port: It is less about formal train­ing and more about lead­er­ship mod­el­ling and being act­ively involved in coach­ing / mod­el­ing how to lead. There is a need for KBC lead­ers to get closer to the com­munity, less formal ses­sions and more informal con­nec­tion, coach­ing and prayer. We as small group lead­ers need to con­nect more with one another and with the KBC lead­er­ship. The ‘empower­ment’ and ‘trust’ placed in small group lead­ers is great, but if we are to be effect­ive with build­ing lead­er­ship capa­city, it is going to be neces­sary to get a lot closer to the lead­ers, coach, mentor, dis­ciple and learn to flow in the min­istry to oth­ers, so that small groups have a heathly bal­ance between just being a sup­port­ive com­munity to one another and also being effect­ive in min­istry to one another and the com­munity around them

   Lastly: an annual cal­ender is neces­sary (maybe it exists and I am just not aware of it). As small group lead­ers, we do not have enough lead time to plan around KBC meet­ings, social / kids / fam­ily and busi­ness com­mit­ments. It will be help­ful if an annual cal­ender can be pub­lished with lead­er­ship con­nect­ing points, train­ing events and cas­ual con­nect­ing with KBC lead­ers. LESS IS MORE

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3. Pat Hegarty says:

   November 5, 2009 at 3:20 pm

   Some great thoughts there. I can action the cal­en­dar idea eas­ily, and will make it avail­able as a down­load from the web­site. Sounds like Elaine is already on track too.

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4. Geoff Hales says:

   November 7, 2009 at 12:38 pm

   Strongly agree with 3 values/principles…especially 1 & 2.

   In regards to pro­pos­als for how to reach out more, its hard to find a one size fits all. (Time/priorities is obvi­ously the biggest obstacle). So lets thow up ideas to the groups, and bet­ter still good examples on how groups are doing it. Examples dont have to all come from KBC groups.

   Our group has always had an object­ive of looking/reaching out. But mak­ing it hap­pen was the tricky part. We looked at options of doing so as a group on a reg­u­lar basis..say fort­nightly or monthly. But then we recog­nised that many were already doing so indi­vidu­ally through other aven­ues (eg RE, chap­li­ancy, meals on wheels). What we decided to do then is:
   1/ to encour­age efforts being made by mem­bers out­side of the group, by once a month hav­ing mem­bers shar­ing what they are doing, and hav­ing the group sup­port them in prayer
   2/ once a term hav­ing a group organ­ised activ­ity, such as par­ti­cip­at­ing in Yes We Care in 2nd term, fol­low­ing this up again in the 4th term, mak­ing things (eg meals and care boxes) and dis­trib­ut­ing to those in need.
   Cant say it we do it all as well, and as much, as we’d like.

   By the way, we meet 3 weeks in four, and find it a good com­prom­ise between every week and every fort­night. But we dont neces­sar­ily say reach out on the night off. We encour­age mem­bers to go out with their spouse, and its usu­ally on the week­end fol­low­ing one of those nightts that we sched­ule our once a term com­munity out­reach activitiy.

   Bless­ings
   Geoff

   PS Hav­ing this forum seems a good way to communicate…but notice there is no spell check. Havent got time to proof-read this submission…hope it makes sense.

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5. John Mansfield says:

   November 13, 2009 at 2:11 pm

   The word “inten­tional” is pop­ping up every­where and without it becom­ing a buzz word that loses it’s mean­ing we need to really agree on what we under­stand it to be. We also need bal­ance our inten­tion­al­ity with the fact that we can­not con­nect with the com­munity if we come across as people on a mis­sion or try­ing to accom­plish a pro­gramme. I am find­ing it hard to come up with ideas of how to inten­tion­ally con­nect with non­chris­ti­ans on a week night. The inten­tion of the home group mem­ber is not the issue – it is their method that we need to analyse.

   We need to cre­ate, find, use and max­im­ise situ­ations, events and activ­it­ies that allow us to build rela­tion­ships. I do not believe that we will do this by cre­at­ing orches­trated events. I also believe that a week night is unlikely to be the best oppor­tun­ity. As already stated on the forum we need to do less but do what we do, do better.

   As part of a men’s Home Group (and since the Men’s Camp) we have recently been dis­cuss­ing the need to have sons con­nect more fre­quently with their own Fath­ers and their Fath­ers friends and in the case of single Moth­ers offer­ing to get their sons involved with us. We also acknow­ledge that there is a need as “older” men to be ment­ors and examples to the younger men. In fact some younger Home Groups have reques­ted this of us. This is not neces­sar­ily con­nect­ing with those out­side the church but still is an import­ant role for some of us to play.

   To reach the non saved is a must do and we need to go to them and not expect them to come to one of our events. So where are they? What do they do? Once we have answered these ques­tions we need to find out how, who and when we can get involved in the activ­ity and how to build a rela­tion­ship with them through this activ­ity and it needs to be genu­ine rela­tion­ships with genu­ine intentionality. 

   Some of the things our group has been doing is help­ing flood vic­tims recover and rebuild their homes. This is some­thing a group of men find easy to do: work­ing with their hands while build­ing friend­ships. We also have walk­ing groups where the guys meet once a week after din­ner and the kids are in bed. It usu­ally ends up at a McCafe for desert and a chat. A lot of dis­cus­sion and rela­tion­ship build­ing can evolve while pound­ing the foot­path late at night. Other events that we as a group have ini­ti­ated and invited people to are moun­tain bike rides, water ski­ing and a cycle ride along the Bris­bane River with a pic­nic lunch at New Farm Park.

   Activ­it­ies that we could act­ively go to, to seek out and find non Chris­ti­ans could be the fol­low­ing:
   –sports and hobby clubs
   –school sport­ing events – strike up friend­ships with the par­ents on the side­lines
   –volun­teer to work on a food van
   –volun­teer to work at a soup kit­chen (OZ Care, Club 139 etc)
   –join a music club (jazz, opera etc)
   –go to car enthu­si­asts events (4WD, Drags etc)

   The key to select­ing these is to be com­fort­able and nat­ural in the activ­ity. If you could find 2 or more from the Group to go together, it would assist in sus­tain­ab­il­ity and keep motiv­a­tion levels high. Another thing to con­sider is to set up rosters if appro­pri­ate. This would work in the volun­teer type activ­it­ies. How­ever you must ensure that reg­u­lar attend­ance is main­tained as the goal is to build relationships.

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