Note: This has been excerpted from Community: Taking Your Small Group off Life Support by Brad House.
We have all been there. Six o'clock on Tuesday evening, sitting in an awkward circle in the living room, trying to think of something clever but not too revealing to say. Jane starts in with an icebreaker: "If you were a piece of fruit, what fruit would you be?" You can't wait for this to end. Thankfully your group leader turns the group's attention to some question from last Sunday's sermon. "Do you agree with what Pastor Jim said about Jesus?" Crickets. As you try to avoid eye contact, your mind wanders to the work you could be catching up on. When the evening finally ends, you feel a sense of relief and accomplishment that you have carried your cross another week. You are excited that you won't have to do that for another seven days, although you do feel a twinge of guilt that you won't fulfill your promise to the leader that you will invite a friend because, truth be told, you would be embarrassed to bring a nonbeliever into this community.
This is not transformational community. Somewhere along the way we equated these awkward gatherings with what it means to be a small group and have adopted these rhythms without any thought. We have passively sucked the joy, life, and sanctification out of community. We can experience more.
By now you have probably picked up on the idea that I am not a huge fan of awkward small groups. Community should be a source of life, and we want to breathe life back into community groups. It is important to understand the gospel and its implications for community. Having our minds renewed by the Word of God with regard to community is the first step to reviving it in our churches. Then it is time for some new wineskins.
"No one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed" (Luke 5:37). In the same way, if we try to cram the ideas we have talked about into our traditional view of doing community, then something is going to break. We need to break through some of the basic assumptions that define a community group. If we are going to pour the new wine of the gospel lived out in community—expressed in worship to God, community to one another, and mission to the lost—then we need new wineskins.
Rhythms are the wineskin of community. An event once a week cannot contain gospel-centered community on mission with God. If we are going to breathe life into community, we must rethink how we practically live life together.
Opportunity-Based Community
During a recent conference a leader asked me how his group would ever reach the people in their neighborhood when they didn't have enough time each week to address the struggles in their group. This question is excellent. It reveals the common distortion that community should be inward focused and the struggle of a group to look up from their own navels. The picture was becoming clear to this leader. Gospel-centered community would take more than a two-hour event once a week.
This type of community requires a complete rethinking of how we see our participation in a community group. What if "community group" referred to a people rather than an event? When I think of the people I love and enjoy being around, I start to dream of opportunities to be with them. The body of Christ should be like that. This doesn't mean that we don't have events within a community group. It simply means that we define our group by the people and relationships in it rather than the events themselves.
An event-based community is one that predominantly sees the event once a week as their community group. It defines a community as a time and place. Opportunity-based community is the idea that we are always a community group whether we are together or apart. When we are part of such a community, we are always on the lookout for opportunities to include one another in common moments of life.
For an example, let's look at how I operate within my family. Each morning we have breakfast together, and we read the Bible and pray. Afterward, I kiss my wife and kids and go to work for the next nine hours or so. I come home after work, and we eat dinner and spend the evening together. At what point am I a part of the family and at what point am I not? Being a part of my family is part of my identity and affects the way I live when we are together or apart. I think about them when we are not together, and I can't wait to be with them again. I think about ways to bless them and how I can share my experiences with them throughout my day. That is how a community group with a lifestyle perspective of community functions. If we can create a culture of opportunity like this in our small groups, we can change the way we think about community within the church.
One of the keys to developing opportunity-based community is shepherding your group to be self-organizing. One mistake that leaders often make is that they feel obligated to attend or plan every event. Not only will this fry a leader, but it also makes it difficult for members of the group to develop any sense of ownership. A leader may have to get the ball rolling, but once a group experiences authentic community, it can begin a perpetual rhythm of natural community.
When a community group becomes opportunity based, countless possibilities open up. Everything becomes an opportunity to worship, serve one another, or share the gospel. Taking my family out for pancakes on a Saturday morning becomes an opportunity to invite another family that we want to get to know and encourage. Garage sales become a time for fellowship. When going to the store, we think of one another and pick up an extra gallon of milk. We help build fences and paint houses. We live as a community.
A New Rhythm
Breaking free from an event-focused view of community is not that easy. Most of our small-group experiences have been event-based Bible studies or something similar. In order to break such patterns, we must begin by reimagining the basic rhythms of community.
Rhythms can be defined as the when, where, and what of the community. For our discussion we will call them the time, scene, and substance of a community group. For example, the canonical event-based community group meets at 7:00 pm every Tuesday night (when/time), in the leader's living room (where/scene), for a Bible study (what/substance). This becomes the rhythm of the group. On Tuesdays we are a community, and the rest of the week we are living our lives individually.
When these rhythms are rigid and finite, a community group will remain event based. Rigid group rhythms often produce inauthentic and labored groups. Challenging these rhythms is the beginning of reinventing your community group.
I want leaders to constantly ask questions about why they do things. Why do we meet at this time? Why do we meet in this place? Why do we do this when we get together? Does this give life? As we ask these questions and realize that community can be more than once a week, we are on our way to living, breathing community groups.
As we answer these questions, however, the goal is not simply to live life together more. The goal is to be inspired by the death and resurrection of Jesus to live differently. We want to offer more opportunities because we love our brothers and sisters and we have an urgency to share the love of Christ with our neighbors. Don't settle for a new system. If we want to effect change in the lives of our neighbors, we must be willing to be destroyed and rebuilt by the gospel.
—Taken from Community: Taking Your Small Group off Life Support by Brad House, copyright 2011. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
