Well last night was an interesting night in my small group, well, it was interesting for me anyway!  You see last night we did the first in our small group lessons that are drawn from my sermon series on Sunday morning, How To Live Like Jesus In A Messed Up World (it’s a series on Colossians).

I got this idea from Mark Driscoll and others, who talk about how important it is to link what you as the Lead Pastor are teaching to your small groups.  This is a way to help people apply what they are learning on Sunday morning, and who knows, they might actually remember some of it too! (BTW, I’m linking to Driscoll because he was the first one I heard talking about this, and I remember how excited I got a few years ago as I listened to him. So he gets the link!)

To use Driscoll’s terminology, it’s linking your air war (preaching) with your ground war (small groups).  Being a military history nut I immediately took to his metaphor, and still think it’s very appropriate. I love the idea of tying what I’m preaching on Sundays to what my people are discussing and trying to live out during the week!

Since coming to KCC I’ve talked about doing this, but had to wait till now.  Why wait?  Well for one thing we didn’t have any small groups when I got here!  And I decided that doing 40 Days of Purpose was the best way to do a number of things here, including introducing small groups to our church life.

So if you’re still with me I imagine you are asking how it went?  If you are reading this and were there – I’m asking you to answer honestly in the comments okay?  Don’t let me down now!

I actually thought the discussion was good, and probably would have been better if more of our group had been here. But it was a good and thought provoking time I believe.  I found some errors in my Leaders Guide (sorry to the other leaders using it, I’ll try and do better next week!) and wish I had thought of some of the questions that came to mind as I was teaching when I wrote the lesson.

But for me that’s par for the course.  That’s why I preach off an outline.  I’ve always been a very extemporaneous speaker and teacher, and guess I always will be.

So I think we did pretty good for the first time at bat, and I expect to do better as time goes on.  (Now if I only had a large enough staff to write my material and proof read it too! OH well, you can’t have everything!)

PS – all of this will be available online at the church site very soon.  I’m not sure when but we’ll get it up there, and yes it will be free of charge and I promise you it’s worth every penny of it!