I Don't Know Why I'm Surprised
We started Grace Groups this summer expecting them to be great or to flop, with no middle path. People keep showing up hungry to grow. That part was never mine to make happen.
When we planned the summer Grace Group pilot, I figured it would go one of two ways. Either it would be great, or it would flop. I did not see much of a middle path.
The shape is simple. Two small groups, six weeks, meeting at the church, one on Tuesday afternoon and one on Thursday morning. We gather, we tend to our souls, we work through a few honest questions together.
The first week, everyone who signed up came. I led the Thursday group on my own, and people shared openly almost right away. I wrote that night that I did not know why I was surprised. The second week, everyone came again. The week after, a new person made it who had not been able to before. Each time, they arrive having actually thought about the questions, ready to say what is really going on in their lives.
I have led small groups long enough to know the flat weeks are real. I have sat in a circle where everyone was tired and no one had much to say, where I finally let people out early. So I was braced for those weeks this summer. What has surprised me is the opposite. People have come hungry.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell this as a story about a program that worked or a pastor who got it right. That is not the story. I set out the chairs and wrote the questions. The hunger in the room was already there before I arrived. What a Grace Group does is give that hunger a place to land on a Tuesday afternoon. The growth belongs to the people, and to the Spirit who has been drawing them all along.
We have a few weeks left in the pilot, and a wider launch in the fall. I do not know how every week will go. But I have mostly stopped being surprised that people show up wanting to grow. Or maybe I have not stopped, and that is fine. Some things are worth being surprised by every time.
Grace and peace,
Pastor Andrew