Our Small Group

I don’t believe I have ever written on this site about something I do every Tuesday evening from 5:15 to 6:30 pm, and have been doing for almost 2 years now, never missing a Tuesday unless I am out of town or ill. I am a member of a small ministry group at our church (HOPE UMC) called Covenant Discipleship Group. There are 7 of us that have been meeting for over a year, it will be two years in the fall.

I haven’t written about it, because it has been my own private way of trying to live my faith, and guess I thought I would keep it private. However, we are now losing one of our covenant members, she and her family are moving away, and now I think I will talk about it, because all of our small group are grieving that we will lose one of our members. This is a big thing for each of us to go through, and it’s on my mind constantly, so I have to talk about it. You can imagine that after meeting weekly for over a year and a half, that we have become bonded together. We cover three generations from age 30 to 70. These women have become very special to me.

Our pastor brought this small ministry opportunity to our congregation. This is a program of The United Methodist Church. To explain it more simply than I probably can here is the how The United Methodist Church describes it:

"Covenant Discipleship is a small-group ministry in the Wesleyan tradition. Groups meet weekly for one hour. The agenda is a covenant written by the group based upon the General Rule of Discipleship: To witness to Jesus Christ in the world and to follow his teachings through acts of compassion, justice, worship and devotion under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Through a process of mutual accountability and support for practicing the basics of Christian faith, members "watch over one another in love." Covenant Discipleship groups help to form people as dependable and mature disciples of Jesus Christ and leaders in discipleship."

When we first started almost two years ago, we worked together to write a covenant, as described in the description above. We start our time together by putting out our table runner with the Covenant Discipleship logo that one of the members made, a clock to keep us on task and a talking stick. Together we read the preamble of the covenant that we wrote (I think by now each one of us could recite this covenant by memory). With alternating leaders, we have a small devotion then we go around our circle and one at a time we share our experience of each portion of the covenant during the last week. Compassion, justice, worship and devotion, spiritual promptings:
--How did we each do in these areas throughout the week?
--How did these things fit into our lives throughout the week?
--Were we “intentional” in showing compassion, justice?
--Did we acknowledge to ourselves when we thought the “Holy Spirit” might have been either talking to us or nudging us?
--Did we strive for unconditional love and acceptance of all God’s creations?
--Did we endeavor to help those who have experienced social injustice?
--Did we prayerfully care for our body, mind and spirit?
--Did we strive to increase our service to others and graciously acknowledge others’ service to us?
These are just some examples of what we share about. Knowing that we will talk each week about these things, helps us to keep these "acts of discipleship" in mind throughout each day during the week.

We respect each member, and we uphold everyone’s confidentiality. By sharing like this we encourages each other in faith. We each feel like this has helped us to grow in love and harmony, as well as in our faith.

We covenant with each other to try to live each day in the knowledge that God’s spirit is within each of us and available to each of us. We also covenant that each one of us will pray daily for each of the other members. At the end of the hour, we go around the circle again and name our prayer concerns for the week, holding hands and closing with prayer. – More tomorrow.