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.