Feeling Like Home: Week of 9/17/17

Hanging Out (10-20 min)

Take time to get to know each other’s names and something about them.  As you go around your circle, consider sharing their answer to this question:

What is one thing that you associate most with home?

After you’ve met one another, talk about the Covenant together (unless you’ve already done this and you’re a Sunday morning group).  You are welcome to look at the covenant we used in training for an example https://gochristfellowship.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/11.Sample_Life_Group_Covenant.pdf

You might also develop the things you will commit to by answering these questions together:  

            What is the purpose of our group?  

            How are we going to handle trust and confidentiality?

            What are we going to do to commit ourselves to each other and to this group?

            How will we pray for each other and check in with each other?

           

            How will we live into the 5 measures questions each week?

Prayer and Accountability (20-30 min)

Introduce the Measures questions:

Passion: Where did I see God today?

Accepting: How am I building diverse relationships?

Invitational: Who am I connecting with God’s family?

Trusting: Where does God rank?

Active: How am I engaged with God’s work?

Each week, we will have a time to share our responses to these questions.  Our group may choose to have each person select the question that resonates most with them.  We may choose to focus on one question for a particular week to come back and answer it. 

Pray together each week after this session.  If you need to stop and pray for a need immediately, that’s fine. 

-Try to get the group comfortable with praying out loud.

-If time permits, have each person pray for a person on the right or left so everyone is prayed for.

Bible Study and Discussion (20-30 min)

1. Read the following quotation from Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter. Port William is a fictional Kentucky town that is the setting of Berry’s novels:

            “He meant, I guess, that Port William has always been, and maybe too that it will always be.  I think so.  You could say that Port William has never been the same place two minutes together.  But I think any way it has ever been it will always be.  It is an immortal place.  Some day there will be a new heaven and a new earth and a new Port William coming down from heaven, adorned as a bride for her husband, and whoever has known her before will know her then.

            Writing about Port William to Virgil in his absence and distance, I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished.  It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever” (43).

Discussion Questions:

-What is it about place that can mean so much to us?

-When people say that Macedonia UMC “feels like home,” what do you think they mean?

2. Read Acts 4:32-37 together.

-This is another example (2 chapters later) from the story right after Pentecost we read on Sunday. 

-How do we practice this type of sharing and “fellowship” in 2017? 

3. We shared what thing makes us “feel like home” in the beginning.  What makes you “feel at home” in church?