I spent the entire day in Springfield, IL yesterday hanging out with fellow Small Groups Pastors from Illinois & Indiana.  One of the things I enjoy the most is being able to sit down with guys & gals who are “in the trenches” of small group ministry just as I am.  We all have different churches and different ministry environments, but the core issues we deal with are often universal.

If I were to boil down a days worth of conversation yesterday, it revolved around the topic of spiritual formation - the process of helping people grow in their walks with God.  As one pastor worded it, “we need to find ways to challenge people to take ownership of spiritual growth.”

As we talked around that topic, a few key thoughts came out…

• We need to utilize some sort of spiritual assessment tool to help people measure their spiritual growth.  The inherent difficulty here is that you can’t measure things such as increases in love, peace, joy…these are all subjective evaluations.  Therefore, whatever assessment a church were to use would need to incorporate both objective (church attendance, hours spent serving, tithing, etc) and subjective (hope, faith, patience, kindness) factors.

• We need mentors.  Men & women need to have older men & older women speaking into their lives.  We need to gain the insights and experiences and wisdom of people who have gone before us.  And older people benefit as well with a renewed sense of purpose and significance.  (We’ll be addressing this topic in an upcoming session of Men’s Fraternity.)

• Taking the need for mentors into consideration…we need to reconsider the benefit of small groups that are multi-generational.  Rather than gathering people together who are all in the same life stage (i.e. young couples), we need to combine together men & women who are at different ages and different levels of spiritual maturity.

There were many more take-aways from our conversations yesterday, but these three thought seemed to dominate our conversation.  I’ll write more later about my personal take-aways as they relate to Great Oaks.

Tomorrow morning begins a new phase in the parenting of my 6-year old son, Ethan.  Every Thursday morning I am going to take him out for breakfast before school for some official (yet informal) Father/Son Mentoring time - hereafter referred to as FSM.  (Yes…I am blatantly stealing FSM from Mark Batterson at National Community Church, but it beats any other title my less-than-creative mind has come up with!)

Our times together will be informal but my goal is to create an environment where Ethan can have some one-on-one time with his Dad, and we can openly talk about life, faith, school, friendships, and - eventually - girls.  I want to encourage Ethan to ask me questions, and I want to have a regular time where I “download” some things I’ve learned over the years.

My hope is that these times together will accumulate over the years to be a source of wisdom, encouragement, safety, accountability, and spiritual/emotional growth.  These FSM moments have the potential to establish a solid foundation for Ethan to grow into a mature, Christ-centered young man who is prepared to handle whatever life throws his way.

(And for those of you that are wondering, I am planning on doing the same thing with my daughter when she gets into First Grade!)

Blake had some great comments and questions in response to my recent post titled “What We Don’t Do.” Check out his comments and my response. Keep the questions and dialogue coming everybody. That’s the goal of this blog…

Thanks, Blake, for contributing to the conversation!