We had transitioned to this style of service because I had become increasingly convinced that the congregation I served knew about Jesus and the Bible, but they did not know how to talk about Jesus or biblical concepts. They could listen, absorb, and learn, but they struggled in actually talking about what they were learning.
In all fairness, if you were to ask the members of the congregation, I’m sure that they would deny my assertion, but the reality is that as the pastor leading a group made up primarily of heavily-churched individuals, I recognized the pattern of familiarity had created complacency and recognized there was a need for a different approach to learning how to live and think like Jesus.
Here’s the format we followed:
We gathered at an appointed time on Sunday mornings at 10:00 AM. We were pretty loose with when we started, sometimes we started right on time, other days we spent the first 5-10 minutes just catching up with each other.
The remainder of the service, the congregation talked about the following questions:
For those who were heavily-churched, this was an incredibly uncomfortable environment. A common complaint was that they just wanted a regular sermon, they didn’t want to have to talk with each other. Because of this, I could see how the conversational environment was a constant irritation to them. They didn’t know how to talk about the Bible that they had heard so much about and because of this, they were unable to see any value in what we were doing.
In the end, this format was terrible for individuals who held onto to the belief that the church was supposed to look and feel a certain way and extraordinary at helping individuals who wanted to actually know and have a relationship with Jesus.