Staying Connected...

Is your small group staying connected between meetings and experiencing life change from the materials you are studying? Thinking back to the Thriving as a Small Group Leader conference, we mentioned how it's possible to stay connected between meetings by the use of social media.

If you and your group members have set up a Facebook profile, you can start a group for members to join and continue your discussion via a wall or message thread format. This allows you to challenge your members to spiritual growth, remind them of any homework, and bring relevance to the materials you are studying. Here are a few simple tips for setting up your group.

How to name your group and keep our program consistent in the search network:

Tiffany Fellowship Church – Small Groups – “the name of your group”

Setting up the access permission for your groups:

• Open - Anyone can join and invite others to join, so this choice may not be best since it will lead to many people joining your group that are not in regular attendance of your group.
• Closed - Leaders must approve requests for new members to join. Your group will show up in search listings and will be easiest for new members to find on Facebook.
• Secret - The invitation is by the leaders only and the group will not appear in search results or in the profiles of the members that have joined.

The rest of the default settings for Facebook groups should work well for you. Enjoy keeping your group connected!

Growth Planning...

As many of you know we are fast approaching our one year anniversary for small groups at Tiffany Fellowship and we want to celebrate all of the great things God has done in this ministry. It is our desire to bring awareness to small groups and give everyone that calls Tiffany Fellowship home, along with visitors, the opportunity to experience the benefits of small group community.

At this time we do not have an abundance of additional leaders or home host’s waiting in the wings and want to stress the importance of developing an assistant for future growth by the multiplying of groups. Along with this, we will also be encouraging church attendance to embrace and sign up to becoming a leader or home host for the small group ministry.

When we begin to highlight small groups at Tiffany Fellowship, it would only be natural to expect interest from visitors and the possibilities of some growing pains along the way to expansion. We hope current plans will quickly help us overcome any initial growing pains that we may experience, but it may be beneficial to start planning for any influx in guests with your home host now.

On Sunday, March 8th we will launch the new small groups guide, promotion cards, and information center. If you have any great testimonies of how God is showing up in your small group, please make contact with us this week so we can begin looking at ways to creatively share this with others. Currently we are looking into and would like to consider your ideas for things such as short dramas and interview style testimonies.

Remember, we at Tiffany Fellowship are called to be a church of Connections and we should gladly come expecting God to empower and equip us to do many great things for His glory!

Ministry Adoption...

I just love it when the Lord drops a ministry burden into someone’s heart and they act upon it and then begin to share the idea with others. My friend Tisha Louthain had a road trip moment the other day when the Lord started speaking a really neat idea into her heart. Ministry adoption!

That’s right, pick a ministry in the church and adopt it as a prayer burden. One of the examples could be having your small group pick up a prayer burden for our Junior Bible Quiz team. This could entail something as simple as prayer journaling the names of the leaders and kids involved and then asking God to enrich their lives with the Scripture they study.

This great idea could even be expanded to include following up and journaling specific prayer needs with the ministry you've chosen, or even writing letters of encouragement to them. I hope you and your group will consider this and other similar ideas, also feel free to share the creative ideas the Lord drops in your heart.

Identifying Brokenness…

The final main session speaker of the ’08 Willow Creek Group Life Conference, Miles McPherson delivered a very inspirational challenge to identify the brokenness and tears of our group and then reach out to your local community in kind. I was so greatly inspired by this message that I felt it very important to share with all of our small groups. We now have this 40 minute DVD available in our small group library if you have interest in showing it at one of your group sessions. The link below will give you a feel for this message and perhaps those that have seen this video can leave comment to their experience.

Miles McPherson, Group Life Conference 2008