A couple of us knew each other, but the rest didn't. So we spent a long time introducing ourselves. That was the whole of our first time together.
We needed to get folks to bring a meal each week on a rotation. So the question went out and the men responded. Like I said earlier, food binds folks together. Time together without food isn't going to produce the best relationships.
Lastly, we each wrote down our individual prayer requests on a 3x5 card and passed it to the person to the right. Everyone was expected to pray for the person next to him, and that's all. This avoids gossip-time that has really dominated prayer request sharing.
At our first time together with food, we broke out the Bibles. It was awkward to read an entire chapter of the Bible and then go down verse by verse, or paragraph by paragraph, waiting in silence for people to tell how it impacted them. People are not used to reading large portions of the Bible and talking about it. Some people are much louder than others, and as a facilitator of discussion, I would have to gently stop them and ask others to talk.
After a few of these meetings, we began to really see the transformation in our hearts. We opened up to who we really were. We challenged each other, as men do. We worked through really difficult passages in Scripture. We celebrated when others had great things happen. We prayed when others had bad things happen. It became a real brotherhood. I've never experienced that before.
Later, we divided the leadership down. I stepped back from facilitating and taught others how to facilitate on their own. Some did better than others. Some tried to teach a lot. Some talked a lot. The hardest thing was "herding the cats". That just means getting people back on track, listening to God, focusing on what He would want in our gathering, rather than talking about random political or other things.
It's sort of become a great experiment to see if leadership can be multiplied through a simple table conversation.
We look forward to starting the gospel of Mark in January.
