Make Ending Well Easy
Up Your Group Prayer Game
Fun With Story Cards
What to Say to a Group Member Who Needs Care
Wrestling with God
Using Story Cards When Your Group Isn't New
7 Types of Questions to Ask in Group, Part 2
7 Types of Questions to Ask in Group, Part 1
Asking Good Questions
5 Faith Thresholds
Asking Great Questions
The New Testament records 183 questions that people asked Jesus. He gave a direct answer to three of those questions, but he asked 307 clarifying or redirecting questions in response. Our takeaway: One well-placed question is better than ten good answers. Asking great questions is a skill every leader should work on developing over time.
Why ask questions? Great questions meet people where they are in their faith journeys. Instead of just providing people with easy (and too often trite) answers, great questions help them to own their faith. Questions encourage people to think for themselves. That self-directed shift in thinking has a higher probability of influencing future behavior. In other words, it has a higher probability of helping people grow.
What makes a great question? Curiosity is the secret ingredient of great question-asking. A leader should be genuinely curious about what’s going on in the lives of his or her group members and what those group members have to say.
Great questions aren't judging. They don’t presume an answer. They’re asked in a spirit of learning. They build empathy.
What makes a great question asker? The most effective leaders are full of conversations, not answers. They're humble, satisfied with delayed credit (or no credit at all), generous, concerned with others, curious, and empathetic. Great leaders ask great questions and continually strive to be better at asking great questions.
I don't know about you, but I'm better at asking questions than I used to be but not as good as I want to be. Improving is hard work, but it's worth the effort.
Landing
Take-Off: The First Phase of your group
Why Facilitating Great Discussions Matters
Knowledge and Wisdom
Andy Stanley's series, Ask It, has gotten me thinking a lot lately about knowledge, wisdom, and the difference between the two. Ours is a knowledge-obsessed culture (we are living in the information age, after all). As a result, we tend to confuse knowledge and wisdom. If we have a problem, our knee-jerk reaction is to throw information at it. Read a self-help book. Watch an instructional video. Google it. We want to believe that if we have enough information, it'll solve our problems.
But it's not quite so easy, is it? Sifting through all the information out there to find what's true and helpful is challenging. That's because knowledge tells only half the story. The other half belongs to wisdom. To clarify things, let's take a quick look at some definitions from Dictionary.com:
Knowledge—acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation.
Wisdom—knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action.
Knowledge is about knowing (duh). Wisdom is about living. One can't be wise without knowledge, but the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake doesn't make one wise. Application is the path to wisdom. This is so true that you can actually become wise by leaning into other people's application. We can learn from the experiences and mistakes of our parents, mentors, bosses, and friends, without having to repeat those experiences and mistakes, if we listen humbly and thoughtfully.
So, what does all this have to do with group leadership? Well, if you've been a leader for any amount of time, you've probably bumped into group members hungry for knowledge. They talk about wanting to go "deeper" in Bible study. There's nothing inherently wrong with digging into Scripture, but keep in mind that our culture over-emphasizes the power of knowledge to affect change. People often don't grasp that just knowing the Bible won't grow them spiritually.
It's more important that your group's interaction with the Bible is focused on personal application than it is on depth. Going deeper for the sake of going deeper won't change your life. But even a "shallow" reading of Scripture—one that doesn't take into account stuff like historical context, literary genre, or rich theological analysis—can change your life, if you ask, "In light of what I'm reading, how can I change the way I live in order to align my heart and my mind more closely with God's?"
Asking that question is the path to wisdom.
3 Ways to Follow Through on Prayer Requests
Perhaps the most important tip I can give you to improve the quality of your group's prayer time is to follow up on prayer requests. There is no better way to reinforce the value of group prayer than to ask members what has happened with their past request. First, it shows you care. Second, it gives the entire group an opportunity to celebrate God's faithfulness.
Here are three simple ways to follow through on prayer requests:
Record them Keep track of prayer requests in a notebook, prayer journal, or a file on your computer. This helps you share them with absent members, email them out during the week, and revisit them . . . which brings us to the second way to follow through on prayer requests.
Revisit them Make a point of asking what happened with past requests . . . especially those that include a critical date. As a group, take some time every few months to review past requests and get updates.
Celebrate them Answered prayer requests are milestones that build our faith in God's faithfulness . . . if we remember what he's done. When you hear about an answered prayer, remind the group that it was something you collectively prayed about, and take the time to celebrate what God has done.
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Adding Structure and Variety to Group Prayer
Routine can be good. Most of us wouldn't be able to maintain physical fitness without stability and predictability provided by habit. But routine can rob a group's prayer time of its energy and vitality. By injecting a little variety into the structure of your group's prayer time, you can keep things fresh.
Timing is critical. If prayer has become an afterthought in your group meetings, maybe it's because prayer comes after everything else. Doing prayer time last isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, lots of groups share more deeply after they've had a good discussion. But if other parts of the meeting tend to run long, it's tempting to cut prayer time short or rush through it. If that's a consistent problem in your group, reserve time for prayer between your relational time and discussion time.
Varying formats can keep things fresh. People connect to God in different ways. The same is true of prayer. Some people gravitate toward the linear simplicity of the "pray for the person to your right" format. Others prefer free-flowing, unstructured prayer time.
Here are some ideas for adding variety to your group prayer times:
Night of Prayer Take a week off from your study to focus on prayer. Break into groups of three to five people and pray through some specific topics. Spend about five minutes praying through each topic. Here are some topic ideas:
Your families
Your neighbors
Your boss or co-workers
Your pastor
Your community
Men's Time / Women's Time (for Married Small Groups) Men and women will often share more when the opposite sex isn't present. Gather husbands and wives in separate rooms to discuss prayer requests and pray. To stimulate conversation, have a facilitator in each room offer a few prepared questions, such as
What is going well, where would you like to improve, and what is one thing we can pray for you about?
How are you doing as a spouse?
How are you doing as a parent?
How things are going at work or in managing your home?
How things are going in your relationship with God?
Directed Prayer Requests (related to the discussion time) Relate your prayer time to your group discussion. For example, if your discussion was about Influence with Outsiders, ask each group member to identify one person in his or her spheres of influence, and what he or she would like to see God do in that person's life.
Prayer Poster Put a large poster board or foam board on an easel and ask everyone to write their prayer requests (large and legible) on Post-Its or 3x5 cards. Attach the requests to the poster. This helps prayer to resonate with those who are visually oriented.
Prayer Partners Individuals or couples can pair up for prayer. For six weeks, the prayer partners share prayer requests and pray for each other during prayer time. They also commit to touch base between meetings to see how things are going or share additional prayer requests.
Adopt a Ministry Adopt one of North Point Ministries' Strategic Partners or Intersect Partners and spend time praying for them.
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7 Things That Kill the Authenticity and Depth of a Group's Prayers
Shallow, inauthentic prayer is one of the biggest factors in undermining a group's prayer life. Here are seven factors that kill authenticity and stunt growth, as well as some strategies for combating each factor.
Too many prayer requests (multiple for each person in the group) When people share multiple requests or go into exhaustive detail about a request, it leaves no time for actual prayer. It also causes some group members to check out mentally. One thing you can do to avoid this is begin prayer time by asking, "What is one the one thing you most want us to pray for this week?"
Shallow prayer requests ("Please pray for my neighbor's grandmother's cat, who ran away") When people request prayer for things that seem trivial, that they just came up with on the spot, or that they aren't praying about, prayer time starts to seem like a waste of time and group members check out mentally. Avoid this by urging group members to focus their requests on something personal. It's okay to ask, "Is this something you're praying about yourself?" or "Is there anything going on with you that we can pray about?"
Group members who never have prayer requests When someone in group consistently says, "I can't think of anything" or "I'm good" during prayer time, it sends the message to the rest of the group that he or she isn't willing to be authentic and transparent. That makes everyone else hesitant to be authentic and transparent. One of the best ways to encourage people to open up is to use directed prayer. It provides focus. Instead of making a general request, ask something like, "What can we pray for regarding your relationships at work?" Another thing you can do is send out an email or text to let people know ahead of time that you want them to think about their prayer requests. Some people are contemplative. Some people need some time to think and dig into what's going on in their lives.
Lack of transparency Sometimes group members make personal requests, but they're still "surfacey." You get the sense that they're probably holding back what's really going on in their lives. One of the best ways to encourage others to be authentic and transparent is to model authenticity, transparency, and acceptance. Be vulnerable when you ask others to pray for you. Remind your group that respect and authenticity are values covered in the Group Agreement, and that they don't have to worry about being judged.
Prayer time dominators When the entire time allotted to prayer ends up focused on one person in the group (not because of an isolated situation requiring care), group members get resentful and bored. If this happens in your group, you may need to have a one-on-one conversation to remind the person of the purpose of group prayer: "I know you have a lot going on you'd like us to pray for, but others in the group also need the opportunity to share their concerns. I'd like you to try to limit requests to two minutes. If you have additional requests, you can send them out in an email."
Problem-solvers Sometimes, a group member will try to solve others' problems rather than listening, acknowledging, and committing to pray. Remind your group that the purpose of prayer time is to share your burdens and take them before God. It's not to solve one another's problems. If a member continues to problem-solve, have a one-on-one conversation focused on how it makes other people feel and how it undermines the group's prayer life.
Repetitive prayer time Prayer time feels dry when group members offer up the same requests week after week. To avoid this, you can mix things up by changing the structure or format of your prayer time. The next post in this series will explore how to do just that.
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Helping Group Members Inexperienced in Prayer
In my last post, I wrote about four barriers to great group prayer. One of those barriers was group members' lack of experience with prayer. So, let's dig a little deeper into what that barrier looks like and some things you can do to overcome it.
Group members who don't have a lot of experience with prayer usually struggle in two ways:
They lack knowledge. Some group members just don't know how to pray. Maybe it's new to them, or maybe they've prayed privately but never in a group. One way to overcome this hurdle is to devote a group meeting to prayer. During the discussion, define or explain prayer and then lead your group through focused prayer based on the discussion. There are lots of ways to teach the principles of prayer. One is the ACTS approach in which you give your group a brief description of four aspects of prayer using the ACTS acronym:Adoration Acknowledging who God is, worshiping him, and praising him for his character and attributes. Confession Confessing sins to clear away anything that breaks fellowship with God. Thanksgiving Acknowledging that God provides for our needs, and communicating gratitude for what he has already done and provided. Supplication Presenting our requests to GodAfter explaining each aspect, encourage group members to think about what they would like to say to God in that area. Lead a time of prayer where members pray out loud about that area. You may also want to provide group members with a note card or "cheat sheet" to help them remember how to incorporate each aspect into their personal prayers.
They lack confidence. It should come as no surprise that people who don't know how to pray will be reluctant to do it out loud. Walking group members through the ACTS approach to prayer will probably alleviate some confidence problems. But you can also help them build confidence by creating some low-intensity baby steps that allow them to practice:
Ask a group member to pray before the group eats dinner or dessert. (You may want to talk to the group member ahead of time, so you're not putting him or her on the spot.)
Have each person in the group write one prayer request on an index card and pass it to the person on his or her left. Then have each person pray out loud for the request on the card.
Split up into groups of two or three for prayer time so no one has to prayer in front of more than two other people.
In the next post, we'll take a look at what to do when your group's prayers lack authenticity and depth.
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