BEFORE THE MEETING – LEADER’S PREPARATION:

Pray: for faithfulness to the Bible, for wisdom and understanding, personal learning for the leader, enthusiasm, good questions, head and heart involvement, something fresh for even the most mature;

Select your material – pray to be aware of the group’s issues;

Write/edit your questions: Their questions, not yours; what’s on their hearts and minds?

Open questions, not closed; closed questions produce yes/no answers but no discussion. (If the question is “Was Jesus a good person?”, rewrite it as “what kind of person was Jesus?”)

Decide which questions can be skipped if need be.

Highlight the application questions; make sure a relevant application-question comes up early.

Plan to involve each person.

Imagination/nonverbals; consider fresh ways of getting involvement in the Bible passage. (Illustration from a DVD? clay modelling?)

Do your background research for if many in the group won’t be familiar with something cultural or historical.

Consider members’ prior knowledge: do they share your culture/presuppositions/ understanding? maybe not!

Expect that the Holy Spirit will enable this; he wants it to go well more than you do!

Clear communication: make sure everyone knows the place and start time of the meeting!

What can I delegate? Maybe you can ask another group member ahead of time to be ready to speak for 2-3 minutes on some background information for the passage? (Eg who WERE the Sadducees really?)

Room environment: work with the host to make the room as conducive as possible; chair placement, heating, lighting, disability considerations

DURING THE STUDY

Who-sits-where can help or hinder a meeting.

Bear in mind hearing issues.

The leader needs to be able to see everyone.

If there’s a real rebel, then leader-sitting-opposite makes it harder for the rebel to wrest control.

Pray together to start.

Listen to God during the study; is this hitting the spot? Is this pleasing him?

Give clear leadership; people like to be led (not the same as bossed), so don’t be scared to clearly say “let’s begin, let’s move on, let’s split into pairs (and point out the first pair)”, etc etc.

Encourage the shy: direct a non-threatening question at a shy person; subdivide the group to give each person more chance to speak; but keep in mind that some quiet people aren’t frustrated and are genuinely happy to say nothing.

Restrain the garrulous!: cut across them if necessary; if they interrupt someone else, don’t immediately shift your gaze away from the person who was interrupted; privately ask the talkative person for their help in bringing out the quiet ones, by not jumping in with answers all the time! (One of our groups actually has written ‘ground rules’ for this.)

Allow silence: resist the urge to answer your own question; maybe rephrase it after a while; silence always seems longer to the leader than to everyone else.

Be aware of mixed ability and maturity and the tensions that can bring; reading ability, readiness to read aloud, Bible knowledge etc may all be on different levels, and some may feel inferior. A positive aspect is that the ‘younger’ ones can be motivated to feel free to ask the ‘older’ ones for help.

Recognize gift: take note if (eg) someone demonstrates real pastoral care for another group member by, say, helping them past an embarrassing ‘wrong’ answer, or if (eg) someone shows a gift for explaining things well.

Check the environment: is the room getting too warm?

Keep up a steady progress through passage: it’s not encouraging if we’ve been discussing for an hour and we’re visibly only 10% of the way through the material…

Deal with tangents – stay with it for a while if the tangent is helping more than half the people, but – assuming the Holy Spirit was also involved in the original planning! – get back to the plan eventually. If you know straight away that you don’t want to go there, ask “Where’s that in the passage?” To cut it off after a few minutes say, “Maybe we can look at that more over coffee at the end”, or, privately, “Y’know, Jim, trade justice IS important, but not every verse in the Bible is about that, so please don’t bring it up all the time, eh?”

Working toward application; we’re not just here for head knowledge; if time runs short make sure you go for the (highlighted) application questions.

Timing: have we gone on long enough, or are we going to finish the notes come hell or high water?

Pray together at the end.

AFTERWARDS (say, the following day?):

Keep a prayer diary.

Evaluate the discussion: Quantity; was the length OK? were the questions too closed?

Quality; were people helped?

Members’ gifts revealed: Who’s going to lead this group when I leave? Or who’s going to lead the other half when it grows and divides?

Pastoral follow-up?

The garrulous – to ask them to cool it

The upset – do they need a call tomorrow to check they’re OK?

The heretic – to gently point out they’re repeatedly misquoting the same scripture or getting something wrong which could mislead others

The rebel – someone who is always playing devil’s advocate in an unhelpful way, or who seeks to control too much

Impact on next meeting: anything I need to change?

Longterm – maybe over 6 or 12 months – are we growing/maturing as we should?

(Big thanks to all the people who had been homegroup leaders at Wycliffe Church, Reading, who helped provide the wisdom above, and to the anonymous friend who collated it all!)

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