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One of the decisions that you’ll have to make early on if you’re starting a small group is where are you going to host it? There’s a lot of options that you can use and all of them have pros and cons. So I want to talk just a minute about some good options if you’re looking at starting a small group, especially offsite from where your church is. The first natural one is your home. Now, home is a great place to have a small group. It feels comfortable. It’s easy to build community in, but there are some things that you want to think about when you think about your home and whether it might be good for your small group. The first thing is how big is it? Because if you’re going to have a large, small group, and I’m talking more than like 12, you know if you’re going to have 16, 18 people in your small group, you want to make sure that you have room in your living room or somewhere in the house where everyone can comfortably sit in a circle, see each other, hear each other, and feel like they’re in community at your house. If they’re having to spread out or sit behind people, that’s going to be less viable than if they could sit in a circle and see everybody in the group. So you want to make sure that your home is big enough and you’ll also want to think about childcare. If you’re going to have a group with small kids like parents with younger kids, you want to make sure that there’s somewhere in the house that you can comfortably have childcare, that the kids can have a safe time and it’s a good place for them to be during the group. So home is a great place for your small group, but there are also some other options.
A few of them are a neighborhood clubhouse. If you live in a neighborhood that has a clubhouse, a lot of times they sit empty during the week, especially at apartments, so you might look into maybe being able to rent it for a small fee. A lot of times it’s just a fee to cover the cleaning costs, but uh, that might be a good option for you. But the downside is if you have childcare, you need childcare, that’s not always a good good place because it’s easily just one room. So, but you might look at a neighborhood, a clubhouse.
Also maybe a room at the church building. Maybe your church allows groups to use Sunday school rooms or rooms at the church during the week. And that’s a great option, especially if they’ll let you use another room for childcare again. Um, but also it kind of limits some of the community that can happen during the small group, especially if you’re going to provide food. Because not all church rooms are good for that. And it’s also not always a great place just to hang out. So that’s kind of a downside to using a room at the church.
You might also be able to use a break room at the office. A lot of offices will allow a Bible study to go on during a break time, but you want to make sure that you clear that with the people at your office. It also allows you to invite people to your group that may not naturally want to come to your home or church or to a room at the church. So that’s another good option. And then a final one is a third space somewhere like a coffee house or something like that. That’s a good place to have, especially if you have a smaller group like 5 to 10 because you can go into a coffee house and sit around a table or a group of chairs and easily be able to have a discussion. Now that’s a tougher place if you’re going to have a larger group, if you’re going to have more than 10, you might look at some other options.
So those are just a few places that you can have your group. All of them have pros, they have cons, but take a look at those as you start your small group.
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