Community Connection: Building Community at Home or Church
Over the past few months, we’ve been sharing spiritual practices for you and the children you love. Our Transforming KidZ Ministry program shares these and others to you help you help children fall deeply in love with Jesus.
This month, we share a practice that helps shape and deepen community at home or at church: Community Connection. Adele Calhoun reminds us that “Spiritual transformation is not a solo event.” Community Connection is a time to listen to our brothers and sisters in the Lord (no matter what their age), to listen to the Holy Spirit on their behalf, and to encourage one another.
“In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found” (Henri Nouwen).
A simple way to practice “Community Connection”
Try this spiritual practice with your family, your Sunday school students, your adult Bible study group, or just the folks you meet with for coffee.
Circle up your family (or form small groups of three to five in your classroom or Bible study).
Have each group select a timekeeper.
Ask participants to sit in silence for one minute.
Give one person (in each group) an object to hold, perhaps a Bible or a small cross. Only the person holding this item should talk.
Time this first group member as she takes five minutes to share her answers to these questions: “At what time in my life did I feel especially close to God?” and “When in my life have I felt distant from God?”
While other members sit in complete silence, they listen to the person sharing and for anything that the Holy Spirit might place on the member’s heart for that person.
Have the timekeeper or follow the five-minute sharing with one minute of silence.
Next, give three minutes for group members to take turns sharing what (if anything) they heard from the Holy Spirit while they were listening. This is not a time to give advice or correct, but it is a great time to share a Scripture, a word of encouragement, or a prayer for the person.
At the end of this sharing, pass the object to a new person and time one minute of silence.
Repeat this process until each member has had a chance to share.
And remember the admonition given to us by the writer of Hebrews, “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (10:25).