Understanding Grace

Coming out of the holiday season, many of our groups have decided to follow our advice and do the Understanding Grace (UG) group curriculum. While this material fulfills the Membership requirement of a Pastor’s class, it is so much more important to the health of our groups and our church. UG is five sessions, each one dealing with a critical component of our ministry at Grace Church. However, unlike a typical Membership class, this material is formatted for deep group discussion. In fact, while set up for five meetings, some groups are already telling us that they are choosing to slow down a bit and take multiple meetings for some of the sections because the discussion has been so rich.

UG is something that we will be asking our groups to revisit on a periodic basis. By understanding the foundations of our ministry at Grace, we can stay true to our calling. What that frequency is, only the Lord knows. Likely, we will ask groups to cover the material every other year. That repetition, along with our annual Vision Month preaching series, will provide for us the standards against which we can test our goals and our plans. Frankly, we are only about 16 months into our transition to being a church of groups. We are beginning to gather people and help them to learn why groups are important and how to love one another as God desires. But we haven’t seen even a third of what groups will be and do in the future. So, if we’re going to arrive at the correct destination, we are going to need to check our course periodically. UG is part of that process.

Over the next week, I will be posting daily about the UG content, one session each weekday. Most of our groups are in or finishing Session 2 by now. One has made it thru Session 3. As I’m able, I will share some of the feedback I’ve been getting also.

See you Monday. We’ll look at our Mission…..