Practicing Habit 1 of the Discipleship Culture Handbook
As the world shifts and adjusts to COVID-19, so does Garden City. We can’t do Sundays or Life Groups quite the same, and just when we released a Discipleship Culture guidebook--which breaks the culture into a series of 12 Habits-- we got stuck at home. That said, the virus can’t take away our Creator, or the work of Jesus; it can’t take away our unity as the body of Christ and it can’t stop us from gathering… creatively.
That’s why we’re trying new things, and that’s why my Life Group has changed our plan. Here’s a clear and simple way to do this:
We usually meet as an entire church on Sundays, but because of the Shelter-in-Place mandate, we now meet at home. Not wanting to lose all sense of communal gathering, we meet at 10am in our Life Group over Google Hangouts. This is the group that would normally meet on Wednesday evenings. We all pull up the Sunday Liturgy on the Hub in a tab or on a screen, mute ourselves and watch the videos individually, and then discuss the content in our video chat.
With our Life Group meeting on Sunday to discuss the Liturgy, which is full of discussion about that week’s habit in the guidebook, having an additional Wednesday evening virtual meeting with the same people and similar content would feel redundant. So, we split into guys and gals discipleship groups. In our new Wednesday discipleship groups, we go page by page and read and discuss the guidebook content at a deeper level, in a smaller group.
My group is myself, Justin Buzzard, Colin Belisle, and Toye Peters. We encourage groups to go through the habits in about 6 months, but because jobs are up in the air right now, I’m graduating college, and Colin will be moving sooner or later, we’ve decided to do an accelerated 90-day trip through the guidebook and we plan on multiplying into more groups, (with Toye and I likely starting our own) as we come to a close. Habit 1 in the Discipleship guidebook encourages us to practice selection by choosing our people, path, and plan. We picked our people by simply splitting up our Life Group into guys and gals; we chose our plan by deciding to continue to meet on Wednesday evenings in these new groups, and all that was left was picking a path.
We decided to supplement our time with a book, Every Good Endeavor, by Tim Keller, in addition to working through the guidebook. We picked the book from the list of recommended supplemental readings in habit 1 of the guidebook, which discusses the plan. We hadn’t all read it and it seemed like a clear and exciting choice.
As we moved through habit 1 as a discipleship group, we discussed the one thing that we each wanted to grow in during this season. It would be a shame to come out the other side of this exactly the same! We talked about practicing stillness, solitude, and silence with more intentionality because it’s easy for us to live centered on tasks, only waking up in time to get work done and working all day until we sleep. I’ve felt like God wants to grow my discipline during this time, and I’m going to do that by practicing some early morning silence. My life is loud, and I am frequently tempted to toss on some headphones to add a soundtrack to whatever my schedule demands. That goal is already helpful, but I’ve made it even more challenging and tangible by asking a member of my discipleship group, Colin Belisle, to text me every morning at 7am to see if I’m awake.
This has been a fun new rhythm, with adjustments that fit the circumstances and challenge us to be more still, read more, listen more, and invest more intentionally in our time and in one another. I challenge you all to select your people, path, and plan. Pick a book, make a goal, find a time, and make the most of this season so we’re not the same when it’s over!