H. Henry Williams

Impacting Others Through Your Love of Study

Do you love to dig into the Bible and study it? Then consider using that love for helping others study the Bible by becoming a Group Life writer. Contact me if you're interested (email link is under my picture at my blog site). Check out the Group Life writing video if you didn't see it last weekend.

 

Story is Fundatmental

Michael Horton in The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way:

A modern myth is that we outgrow stories. When someone asks us to explain who we are, we tell a story. Furthermore, we interpret our personal stories as part of a larger plot. Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? What’s the point? Is there a God and if so can we know him? Why is there evil in the world?

...The Christian answers these big questions by rehearsing the story of the triune God in creation, the fall of the creatures he made in his own image, the promise of a redeemer through Israel, and the fulfillment of all types and shadows in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of Jesus Christ.

The Apostles’ and Nicene creeds are not just a list of key doctrines; they are a confession in the form of a story, our shared testimony to the most significant facts of reality.

80

That's the percentage of small group participation after our fill month (calculated as the number of participants over against the previous month's adult average attendance in worship). That's a great number and huge considering the 99 folks still enrolled in Financial Peace University (some of whom do both).

• Woodbury Campus 77% (78.1% after the winter trimester)
• Hudson 98.7% (82.1% after the winter trimester)
• Combined 79.9% (78.5% after the winter trimester)

One of My Favorite Rituals

Once per month, for many years now, I meet with two pastor friends for breakfast. Took this picture on my iPhone on the way in to our meeting last week. It's Gorman's in Lake Elmo.

I love meeting with these guys. It's been fun and spiritually uplifting. We help each other stay sane in the pressures of everyday ministry. We've been through a lot together. And on a morning like the one in which I took this picture, I felt so thankful to have these guys in my life. It was cold and snowing and dark at 7 a.m.--the very things that make people hate living in the northern regions--but I loved everything about it. It was truly beautiful, warm and inviting.

I hope you have some good rituals in your life you look forward to. If not, maybe it's time to develop some.

101% in Small Groups!!!

That's the small group involvement at the Hudson campus! 101% of our average worship attendance in September (not including Labor Day weekend!) in small groups. Yes, we double checked that number.

86% is the number for both campuses combined! Eighteen months ago we were in the low 60's. Kudos to all of our leaders and to Keith Miraldi, Director of Small Groups. Great work getting people connected.

Try This

What do you do with the prayer requests you hear at small group? I usually forget them. So I'm doing something new this week that's working really well. I wrote all the prayer requests on the following week's Group Life lesson (we hand that out each week). So, as I've been doing my daily Group Life, I've remembered how to pray for everyone in my prayer group every day. Try it next time your small group meets.

Duh

I must admit I have not been able to understand the nature of the question when people have said, "Group Life isn't deep enough"...until a few weeks ago. How can an inductive method (that means, you are not spoon fed but you have to dig to discover meaning) not be deep enough. My usual response has been, "It's as deep as you want to or are able to take it."

Then I had a conversation with one of our small group leaders. Someone in his group told him Group Life wasn't deep enough. So he asked this small group member a very important question that I've never thought to ask: "Do you prepare before you come to group?" The answer was, "No." Of course not. And of course! Duh. The light all of a sudden went on for me.

A guided inductive Bible study can't go deep enough if the first time you look at the questions is at your small group study time. Why? Because the questions require digging in, thinking time and reflection. When you're studying it in a group, it moves too fast for that. It moves at the speed of those who have prepared ahead of time or just know a bit more than your average person.

But what happens when everybody comes prepared? You've gone deep on your own, you've heard from God through his Word (if you went in listening), and now you have the added value of other people's insights. That's a powerful combination. It takes more work, but nothing of value happens without hard work.

That's why the new norm for small groups at Five Oaks is to come prepared. Do the daily study or, at the very least, do it all at once before coming to the group. And don't forget to listen!

78.6...84.3...79

Those numbers represent our small group registration following our fill month! That's percent of adults registered in a small group over against regular attendance average.

• 78.6% - Woodbury Campus
• 84.3% - Hudson Campus
• 79% - Five Oaks Ministries

That's so exciting. Way to go Keith and all the small group leaders.

Too Busy? Too Complicated.

Abraham Piper has been posting on an interview with Paul Tripp on the Desiring God blog. Paul Tripp wrote the best book I read on raising teens (The Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens). Here are some highlights from a May 21 post on biblical community:

What is the greatest hindrance to cultivating community in the American church?

The first thing that comes to mind is frenetic western-culture busyness.

I read a book on stress a few years back, and the author made a side comment that I thought was so insightful. He said that the highest value of materialistic western culture is not possessing. It's actually acquiring.

If you're a go-getter you never stop. And so the guy who is lavishly successful doesn't quit, because there are greater levels of success. "My house could be bigger, I could drive better cars, I could have more power, I could have more money."

And so we've bought an unbiblical definition of the good life of success. Our kids have to be skilled at three sports and play four musical instruments, and our house has to be lavish by whatever standard. And all of that stuff is eating time, eating energy, eating money. And it doesn't promote community.

...I've talked to a lot of families who literally think it's a victory to have 3 or 4 meals all together with one another in a week, because they're so busy. Well, if in that family unit they're not experiencing community, there's no hope of them experiencing it outside of that family unit.

...You can't fit God's dream (if I can use that language) for his church inside of the American dream and have it work. It's a radically different lifestyle. It just won't squeeze into the available spaces of the time and energy that's left over.

...We have sold our four-bedroom house because our kids are gone, and we've bought a loft in Chinatown, Philadelphia. And we're amazed at how simple our life has become. We're grieving over how we let our life get so complicated.

...We're living in a much smaller place. We got rid of most of our stuff. As we went through it, we laughed about how we just collected stuff. All that stuff has to be maintained. It grabs your heart, it grabs your schedule, it grabs your time. It becomes a source of worry and concern and need to pay.

So we've just been confronted with how all of those things that aren't evil in themselves become the complications of life that keep us away from the kind of community that we need in order to hold on to our identity.

77%!

That's the percentage of adults enrolled in a small groups after our fill month over against our average worship service attendance in January. Our hope was to reach 75%, so we're pretty excited.

Here are a couple of other interesting stats related to this:

• Hudson Campus: 87% enrolled!
• Woodbury Campus: 76%

Even though this is a new way of measuring involvement for us, it's the highest enrollment we've every had by whatever means we use to measure. That's pretty exciting. Thanks to all of you who helped man the sign-up table, the office staff that did an enormous amount of extra work each week because of the weekly catalogs, Keith Miraldi and Stephanie Selbitschka for executing the plan and so many others. Way to go!