Transcript:
Hey there and welcome to another episode of the Small Group Toolbox. Now this is a little podcast I'm running to help you be a better group leader or a better growth group team leader. Now, I'm wanting to do a short series on like the first four weeks of Small Group. I think this is more helpful than just thinking about the first week. The first four weeks are really when your group will come together. There's just too much to do in one week. It's better that you think, all right, in the first four weeks, what do we want to achieve there? What are the important things that we want to see in our group? Now, the first thing I want to talk about is like setting group goals. Group goals are really important. Your group has to have a purpose. What are we aiming at? What are we here for? And this is important even if your group is just continuing on from the previous year or it's been going for a while. There's a helpful phrase called vision drift that you would see in management books. Vision drift means just without really thinking about it, your purpose, what you're aiming for, your vision, can just kind of drift out of the way, drift off into the background. And you can be left just maintaining a structure or doing what you're doing, just tradition. And so we kind of want to avoid that. We don't want to avoid mission drift. So we want to recheck, talk about, reframe, remind ourselves of our goals. And so how do you do that? How do you set group goals? Well, I think firstly, let's just have in mind that we are, this is a biblical idea, the idea of things having a purpose, a reason, something going on in the Bible that's often framed as a prayer. Like what is our prayer? What would I be praying for as a group? And so like Philippians 1 verses 9 and 10 is a good example of what a prayer could be. So Philippians 1: 9-10 says, is my prayer that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. And you can see there just a few verses, but what you've got there is something that Paul desires for his people.
It's his prayer about abounding love, more knowledge, greater wisdom, doing what pleases God, thinking about the future of Jesus return, all that kind of thing. You can see how you could form some group goals out of a simple prayer like that. So yeah, things have purpose. We want to keep that perspective. So how do we do it?
Invite your group to share what are their goals? What would they like? So imagine you're sitting around in a group, ideally get a whiteboard up or some butcher's paper, something like that, and just say, well, what are we hoping for in this group? What would you love to see in this group? What kind of group would you like this to be? And there'll be a bit of a pause, but then people will start talking. And you just write up whatever they say. Someone will say, we wanna be a prayerful group, so you write up prayer. And we wanna study the Bible, they write up Bible. We wanna have deep relationships, write that up. Everything goes up on the board there. That's a very kind of collaborative experience. And then, so that's the first thing, share goals. Secondly, you just wanna reflect on those a little bit. You are the leader, remember? So you are leading this group. Ultimately, you're responsible for where this group goals goes. And so as you go through this process, you might say, I really love this and this and this. And I think this is going to be great for our group this year. This is what I want for our group as well. Now there may be a group goal that you're not sort of so persuaded on. Maybe somebody suggests, I would love this group to be where we go for a weekly run together. It's really important to me that we have a weekly run as a group.
And you might be able to say, exercise is good, activity is doing things together. We might kind of, maybe that's a bit of an optional thing. So you provide a little bit of feedback or review on a goal that maybe not is what you really want to focus on. So first, so we've got share goals. Secondly, kind of reflect and review those goals. Thirdly, I think it's good at this point to bring out what your church, what Hunter Bible Church thinks should be the goals of a group.
And that's the point where you would bring out the, what we call the growth group infographic and run through that. That kind of document, just one page, sort of encapsulates what groups are about and what we're hoping for for groups. Now that's gonna correspond very closely to what your group's come up with anyway, but there's a few little phrases there that are kind of coming from the church leadership coming, that's gonna be helpful for you and your group to hear together.
We'll do a bit more on that later. So bring out the HBC goals for the group and the growth group infographic, reflect on those, some helpful discussions, tangents perhaps. And then fourthly, it's time to just finish that conversation. So that's been great. It's so good to have these goals and then capture those goals, like take a photograph of the whiteboard or the butcher's paper or bring it, have it there ready to go next week or put that and put that photo in the group chat or whatever.
This is something you kind of can be accountable for in a terms time or six months time. You can look at those group goals and reflect like how are we going in those is did our group head towards those goals in the past two months, six months? How can we continue to reach those other goals? Can we add to them things like that? So record that's the fourth thing. So share goals firstly, secondly, reflect and review the goals that are suggested.
Thirdly, bring up the growth group infographic, think about the church's goals for groups, and then fourthly, conclude things and record what your group goals are. Now that's something you can do in week one, but if you don't get to it week one, you can do it in week two. You can revisit in week three and four. It's all part of that first four weeks shaping the group experience. So I hope that's helpful. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode.