round one responses

A couple of weeks, a couple of questions, and now some responses. I'll apologize in advance, as I must not have been getting a refreshed page each time I checked the site (possibly a side-effect of migrating my blog to the new beta interface). Here I went a full week thinking no one had responded!

Trust and Openness
In response to my previous post, church regrouping, Jim brought up some key points of what will make ReGroup sink or sail. Trust and openness go hand in hand when attempting to create a safe environment for people to share and grow. Obviously, trust is something earned, so part of that process means that everyone understands the ground rules and someone has to start the cycle. Those ground rules being something of the variety: we respect each other's opinions even if we don't agree; we don't pass judgment on each other's personal decisions; criticism is to be done from an honest and loving attitude, without bitterness or vindictiveness; stories shared in confidence are to be kept within the group, only to be shared outside the group with the permission of the one who shared. When I say someone needs to start the cycle, I mean that openness starts with someone opening up. Since I'm going to be the initiator of the first ever incarnation of ReGroup, my most important job is to share my story honestly in small bites and ensure that others begin to feel they can trust me and each other to share their own stories and experiences. And obviously, as Jim mentioned, trust also comes from getting to know each other in different scenarios, so the ability to change up the format and venue allows different people's personality to shine through.

Living the Busy Life
As a response to a brief additional comment that Jim made, I felt it would be good to bring up that constant nagging aspect of the current American way of life: over-scheduling. We can get so busy in our lives that we often feel we couldn't possibly fit another thing into our schedules. However, it is interesting to note that we often find time to squeeze in things that we want to do, and use the "busy" excuse when something we should do comes up but don't necessarily want to do it. In order to avoid falling prey to the over-scheduling aspect, I think the ability to keep things flexible becomes crucial. Setting a regular day and time should be done, but with the caveat that should the need arise to move to another day or time it can be done to accommodate the group. As for the want/need problems... my advice would be the same for say, golf. If you want to play more golf, but don't often have time, you have to make the time. If it is something important to you, then you will find the time to do it. In this instance, you have to be willing to break the cycle of your life. Another golf analogy: you'd like to buy new clubs, but you don't play that often due to your schedule so you don't feel you can rationalize new clubs; however, if you bought the new clubs, wouldn't you make time in your schedule for more golf the next year in order to make the purchase worthwhile? Short version, you're only as busy as you allow yourself to become, and you are in charge of your schedule -- your schedule is not in charge of you. (Then again, I am an optimist...)

Keeping it Intimate
I think ideally that if the group can stay under 10 people, it would be to a greater benefit to the group's self-determined goals. I say this because smaller groups have a tendency to foster greater intimacy and stronger relationships between people. However, that doesn't mean that the group couldn't swell to above 15 people for a given meeting or event. One of the other important aspects is that the group should always feel open and inviting to anyone and everyone, so obviously there wouldn't be a group bouncer who turned the 16th person away. The key here is that the small nature of the group is designed to foster relationships and encourage strong bonds so that we can help each other in our journeys.

Evolving with Change
In order for the group to remain flexible, authentic, and relevant, it needs to be able to cope with change in group dynamics. One of the most obvious kinds of change is the fluid nature of the group. Everyone in the group, especially those committed to the community for the long haul, need to recognize that the group may serve some people for a short time. Hopefully, those we help will stay in touch, but we don't require them to stay in the group forever. Another kind of change to deal with is change brought on by growth, when the group starts getting close to 15 people or above on a regular basis. At that point, the best scenario is for at least 3 or 4 people to make the commitment to spin off another group. They wouldn't have to spin into a completely autonomous entity if they didn't want to; as Jim mentioned, I think drifting between groups would be good and occasional multi-group organized activities would be even better. Another kind of change might even be a group deciding that rather than spinning another networked-yet-independent group from itself, they choose to set down roots and form a somewhat more traditional church body -- weekly services, classes, leadership team, preacher(s), and of course ReGroups.

I like to think of the growth process like gardening; tomatoes for example. You plant the seeds, water them, ensure they get proper sunlight, remove weeds that would impede growth, and in the end you hopefully have a healthy plant that bears ripe tomatoes. But that's not the end, those tomatoes are chock full of seeds, which you could reserve during meal preparation for a couple of purposes. You could use the seeds to increase your yield of tomatoes next year, you could share the seeds with a friend to help them establish their own tomato garden, you could give the seeds to a school and offer to help teach children about how plants grow with them, etc and so on. The only limitation is the the self-placed one.

Keep the questions, ideas, and comments coming... they only help to further define an explore the many facets of ReGroup!