Table Questions
(for use during a meal or dessert time)
- What’s your earliest memory of this church?
- What’s something you disagree about with a good friend of yours?
Resources You May Want to Consult
- Blog post: 3 Key Insights for Having Difficult, Honest Conversations by Kathy Smith. A summary of three insights discussed in the book Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler.
- Blog post: 9 Tips for Entering & Sticking with Tough Dialogue. Jeanette Romkema writes about some tips for engaging in tough dialogue, drawn from her experience of 20 years in dialogue education.
- Leadership training: Designed by Pastor Church Resources, The Challenging Conversations Toolkit is a five- to nine-week small group guide that helps members of your church engage with challenging topics. Though designed to focus on the particular topic of human sexuality, the three-hour facilitator training introduces leaders to better tools for all kinds of conversations that acknowledge differences while still pointing to Christ and building up the faith of participants.
- A number of worship resources are available as you work your way through the Crossroads Discernment Process.
Reflection Questions
These questions may be used by the facilitator when engaging with the group:
- How does it feel to be the listener? What’s hard about listening to one another? What’s hard about listening to God? What did you learn?
- How does it feel to be listened to? What’s hard about it? What did you learn?
- What did you learn from this experience that could help you form principles for having conversations about more difficult topics as you go through this process together? What type of environment creates a safe space for these conversations?
- How can you balance grace and truth in your conversations? What might happen if either grace or truth outweighs the other?
Next Step
When you feel that you’ve laid a strong foundation of listening to God and to one another, and that everyone involved is ready to enter into deeper conversations, you’re ready for the Engaging the Past stage.
It’s important to celebrate the accomplishment of the progress you’re making. How will you celebrate the transition into each stage? A few ideas:
- Create a bulletin board depicting the stages and an arrow pointing to the stage you’re currently in.
- Create space in a worship service to note the transition into each new stage, to hear a testimony about how God worked among you in the previous stage, and to pray that the next stage will be fruitful and constructive as well.
- Ask an artist to draw the outline of your church logo or of another symbol that’s meaningful to you. Use crayons or markers to color a portion of it each time you make progress, and in the end you’ll have a completed picture.
- Create a “certificate of accomplishment” for each stage. Send it as a PDF to your church mailing list after each stage completion.
If you find yourself stuck at any point, reach out to us—Pastor Church Resources. We’re here to help.
Once you’ve completed this Gathering Your Congregation stage, go to the Engaging the Past stage.
CRCNA Testimony
I have used dwelling in the Word in an established church and in a church plant. The dwelling in the Word practice is different from our usual way of engaging the Bible. We tend to do “one off” readings of the Bible in which we study a text one week and then run on to the next one. We seldom stay long enough to ask whether we’re actually doing what a text calls us to. When dwelling in a rich text like Luke 10:1-12, for example, I’ve seen groups ask and begin to discern how to engage their neighborhoods in the way that Jesus calls his disciples to in that text. I‘ve seen groups begin to experience where and how they can join Jesus where he’s at work.
—Rev. Jon Huizenga, pastor of Rise Up Church, Cedar Springs, Michigan