Dear Small Group Leaders of Christ Church,
I hope you all are enjoying this Lenten series on spiritual disciplines. The discussion guide for this week’s discipline of fasting is provided as an email attachment and as a downloadable item at the www.smallgroupleaders.net site. Please send a friendly meeting reminder email to your group members and be sure to attach the discussion guide and include the link to the sermon videos- www.christchurchsl.org/sermons. You may also wish to include the link to the daily devotions of lent at Christ Church- www.christchurchsl.org/lent. The devotionals are on theme with the discipline of the week, Monday- Friday, and you can subscribe to receive them via email by entering their email address in the box on the right side of the screen. The Small Group Discussion Guide and Leader Tips for this week are provided below and are also available at smallgroupleaders.net in multiple formats (video, audio and text). The links for two additional attachments, the Habitat House Volunteer’s Meal Sponsorships schedule and the Realm guide for Group Leaders, are also listed below.
Discussion Guide- 2-25-18 Sermon Discussion Guide- Fast Foods and Faith
Habitat Lunch Schedule Openings- group service opportunity- habitat volunteer meal support
Realm Group Leader Support Document- Realm-Group-Leader-Guide
Leader Tips Video Format-
Leader Tips Audio Format-
Leader Tips Text Format-
Leader Tip#1 – The Topic of Fasting
You may find that different people within your group have health needs that make abstaining from food an impractical discipline for them. The goal of the discipline is a deepened prayer life, not a need for medical attention! Please encourage your members to be aware of what their doctor would advise in this area. As you will see in the discussion guide, there several alternative ways of practicing fasting that does not involve eating. Perhaps you could encourage some of these other ways to those who have the need for a very regular diet.
Leader Tip #2- service project opportunity
As mentioned at the end of the discussion guide in the application section, there is a possible group service project for you in sponsoring a Saturday meal for the volunteers working the Christ Church Habitat For Humanity house. See the attached flier for open dates that you can contact renee about at reneet@christhchurchsl.org. Doing a service project as group is a great experience to do every once in awhile. It is a win-win, the group gets closer in serving together, and the kingdom of God wins through the good work that the group chooses to pursue. If not a Habitat House meal sponsorship, or volunteer work on the Habitat house, perhaps another service project opportunity in the near future will work out for your group.
Leader Tip #3 – Realm, the new church membership online database
As I mentioned last week, you can do group attendance and a whole lot more in the new online church membership database called realm. It can be a good communications tool with such features as group messaging, posting photos and text and creating online events that members can see and respond to. Attached is a pdf file of a Realm reference guide for the features that group leaders may wish to make use of. A good place to start is try logging in and entering in who attends your meeting this week. More information about Realm and the link to the log-in is available at www.christchurchsl.org/realm. The group is already set up and when you log in, you should see the name of your group listed in the drop down menu under “Groups.” Then just click on the menu item “attendance” in the middle of the screen and then click on the date of your upcoming meeting. If you have trouble with it, just let me know and we can find a time to try to work through it together. One advantage of doing attendance, is it flags leaders when someone misses three meetings in a row so that a personal contact can be made to see if something is wrong, or if they have simply forgotten about the meetings or if something else is going on.
I pray the Lord meets with you and your group this week in wonderful ways as you strive to grow together in fellowship and Bible study, and the practice of spiritual disciplines like confession and fasting. I believe if people who are new to fasting give it a try, they will have a faith stretching and enriching tangible experience that they can share about in the following week. We’ll see!
Peace and Grace,
Dan Conway
Pastor of Discipleship & Outreach
Christ Church