Sunday, June 10, 2018

Naming Your Small Group

If you’ve spent much time in Church recently, you’ve been introduced to the organizational tool that has swept practically all of Christendom...the small group. Actually, precisely what to call the thing isn’t exactly clear. Small group. Life group. Family group. It’s all over the map. Essentially it serves the same purpose as a Sunday School class used to, only it meets during the week in someone’s home instead of at church... and food is involved.

I’ve been a part of one of these groups for over a year now. It’s Pam and me and four other couples. Sadly, I am the oldest of the ten members, a sad and irksome fact of life I have reluctantly come to accept. However, ours is not one of those multi-generational small groups we keep hearing about. No...there are no young couples with toddlers running around, nobody on Social Security. We are all in pretty much the same stage of life. We all have either grown children or children on the cusp of independence. We all take turns hosting  our gatherings, and during most of the year we meet three or four times a month, during the summer, a bit more sporadically. We communicate with each other via a nifty little private chat room app called GroupMe, which our fearless leader, Chip the Engineer, accidentally referred to as “Grope”Me one night, and the name has stuck! Anyway, we get on there to organize meals and whatnot, and also just to keep in touch during the week. Well, last night was a GropeMe highlight. One of our members brought up the fact that she doesn’t know what to call...”us”...home group reminds her of a nursing home, small group sounds like kindergarten, and life group sounds too pretentious. We need a snappy name, she said! 

Chip the Engineer’s wife sent us a link to an article which offered potential names for small groups...so apparently we aren’t the only ones thrashing around for snappy names! As the oldest member of the group, I found all of the names in this article highly offensive, since they were all derisive of older people...Geri-Actives and sizzling seniors. Somebody threw out...Hope Geezers, and The Pacemakers. Then it degenerated rapidly from there. We have several golfers in the group, so someone suggested, The Swingers...which I kinda liked because it seemed just questionable enough to make it interesting! After thirty minutes of this, no decision was made, so at this point we remain nameless.

So, our last meeting was just this past Thursday at our house. Our rule for the summer months is that whoever hosts the meeting is responsible for leading the devotion, or bible study portion...so this one fell to me. I decided to lead a discussion on the significance of the Seven Deadly Sins vs The Cardinal Virtues... a sort of compare and contrast kind of thing. I gave Chip the Engineer a heads up about the content so he could prepare some power pointish slides for illustration purposes. So, after dinner, I start in with the lesson and his first slide pops up on the screen...

The Seven Daily Sins

Set aside for a moment the fact that our fearless leader is now responsible for two epic Freudian slips. More importantly, this second one gave me a great idea for a proper name for us... The Dyslexics!!

Just in case some of you are wondering just how theologically sound and doctrinally vigorous our studies are, the following slide is illustrative... 






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