Discipleship Groups

In our analogy of everyday life events, we think of Discipleship Groups as siblings or a group of friends who are for each other, knowing the ups and downs of life and encouraging each other to push on.

In a Discipleship Group we use the spiritual practice of Lectio Divina to help us read the Bible to ask the Discipleship questions:

  • What is God saying to me?

  • What am I going to do about it?

We know that by giving space for God to speak into these questions we can live a life more in tune with what he is doing - the “Follow Me” of Jesus’ discipleship.

We also know that doing this with others, knowing they will cheer us on, support us and, importantly, ask us how things are going, makes it far more likely we will actually put our good intentions into action.

Discipleship Groups are really easy to start, just find another person or two who wants to be more intentional about including God in their everyday life. We find these work best in person about fortnightly. It can be done in a cafe, over lunch, in a park. You can add members and if it gets too large you can multiply into two groups.

Members of your Discipleship Group don’t need to be part of Exeter Vineyard. In fact, they don’t even need to be Christians, just someone who is up for seeing what God might be saying to them and exploring what it would mean.

Because Discipleship Groups require scheduling we don’t have a process to ‘assign’ people to groups. However if you’re struggling to find someone to do this with then contact us and we’ll see if we can help.

CABDAQ

We have created a simple model to help us do this process. It has six stages:

1. Catch up & Chat

What’s happened since the last time you met?

2. Ask

A simple prayer to invite God to be involved

3. Bible

Read a passage to hear God speak. We’re looking for something that might catch our attention or something that seems timely or relevant. The Psalms and the Gospels are good places to start. It’s worth reading the passage slowly out loud and then leaving some time for reflection.

4. Discuss & Discern

What’s the reason you’ve noticed something in the passage? How does it connect to your life? What could you do about it? This is where you get to chat to try and answer the discipleship questions.

5. Ask

An opportunity to pray for each other as you go out into your life.

6. Question

What do you want to be asked next time you meet together? It can be helpful to post this into your Discipleship Group groupchat as a statement of your intentions.