Primer Guide 1: New Communities
Take Communion
Read Mark 14v22–24
Facilitator Note: Take elements around to each person, saying “the body of Christ broken for you, the blood of Christ shed for you”, and pray for the table:
King Jesus, I thank you for each of the people at this table tonight, stepping out in faith in you and in one another. I pray you would bless this community, and our conversation tonight. Amen.
Family Prompt:
What's the highest form of potato and the lowest form of potato?
Read this Overview
Facilitator Note: While we definitely want you to hit the points in this script, you’re leading a table because of your lived experience in Community and leading Community. Please feel permission to share what your own Community does for each of these discussion areas and share from your experience in general as needed. It may help jumpstart a conversation!
Hey friends! Really excited to be with you. Most of our time here is going to be spent in discussion together. Community is what you make it, and we’re making part of it right now.
Before we dive into some of these nitty gritty questions, I do want to have one more connection moment, and ask, in 30 seconds or less (PLEASE KEEP IT BRIEF! 🥲):
What’s your name, and how long have you been at Bridgetown?
Where do you live?
Who’s in your family (kids, etc)?
Exercise for tonight
Okay, we’re going to go ahead and dive in:
Day to Meet (1 minute)
Quick touch point! Based on the availability you turned in, this Community has been assigned to meet on _____________ (will be posted at table).
Time to Meet (2 minutes)
Bridgetown Communities meet for 2 hours each week, starting at 6 PM, 6:30 PM, or 7 PM (with the majority starting at 6:30 PM). The start time is usually determined by a combination of work schedules (Can you reasonably get to someone’s home with a prepped food item by 6 PM?) and/or kids’ bedtimes.
Does anyone have a strong preference for one time or another?
Given all this, we’ll try out starting at ____________.
Note: if no strong preferences exist, do 6:30 PM. If conflicts arise and it won’t work, direct them to the Communities team at the end of the night.
Where to Meet (3 minutes)
Next, we need to have a conversation about where we’re going to be meeting! There are a lot of factors that go into choosing a place to meet. Someone may have a heart for hosting (or multiple someones!), while another family with young kids may want to host so they can put kids to bed on time.
Does anyone have a desire to host? Or do any of the parents at the table have a preference for hosting?
Note: If more than one person wants to host, that’s great! You can decide on some kind of rotation tonight, or at least choose the next two weeks. And make sure they know this decision can change as the Community progresses—it doesn’t have to be written in stone tonight.
Dinner & Communion (7 minutes)
There are a ton of great ways to manage the dinner portion of the night. There’s no one right answer. Some groups rotate cooking for everyone (so you, or you and a buddy perhaps might cook for everyone every 6 weeks), some do potluck style every week with everyone contributing a dish, and some tag team a dish like burrito bowls with one person bringing cooked rice, another meat, another guac, etc. (like we did tonight). Finally, and bless you if this happens for you guys, maybe you have one person with a passion for cooking and you can all just chip in weekly or monthly for this person to buy ingredients to cook a meal.
So to recap, your options are:
Meal Rotation: Everyone takes turns cooking for the whole group.
Potluck: Everyone brings a full dish, or contributes to a meal like bowls.
One cook: You all pay for one person to cook.
Bridgetown Communities also have a Food & Hospitality Coordinator, to make sure that meals are organized and scheduled. So for example, if you do the “everyone bring something” option, this person would create themed sign ups, or if you do meal rotation, they would assign people to weeks. So we’ll need someone to volunteer for that!
A few questions to get us started:
Does any one of these options really appeal to you?
Would anyone like to volunteer for the role of Food & Hospitality Coordinator to organize and schedule meals?
Are there any dietary restrictions/allergies/preferences people would like to share?
Speaking of Coordinators, one thing we’ll do every week is observe Communion together with some version of the bread and the cup. Would anyone like to volunteer to coordinate this? This role would involve bringing, or assigning someone to bring, the elements for communion, and facilitating the communion moment (or assigning someone to do so).
Note: If there are no strong preferences, steer groups toward the potluck option to start.
Kids (10 minutes)
With some logistics down, let's take a few minutes to talk through how we want to care for our Kids and Families in this community. Can we quickly recap the number of kiddos in this Community as well as their ages?
Our desire is for kids to feel like this is their Community too, and to eventually form relationships with the other kids and adults in their group. One way we want to facilitate this is by including Kids in the dinner portion, and the family section (usually an “everyone answer” question over dinner). When we hit the second half of the night though, when we do a Community Guide, we recognize it’s a lot for kids to sit through, and it’s hard for the adults (especially parents!) to be present to the conversation. So it’s not usually realistic to include kids in this portion.
Some Communities have a rotating system for two adults to watch the kids in the other room, or perhaps if the kids are older they watch a movie or mutually agreeable show. Some groups even hire babysitters, although there’s no expectation for that!
Let’s start the conversation by working through a couple questions:
Acknowledging that finding a balance is going to probably take some time, what is everyone’s preference for integrating kids in our Community? Any ideas or hope you’re bringing into Community?
After hearing that, do the parents of the kids in our Community have any other ideas to add? (Note: If anyone prefers to take a week to think about this, that’s ok!)
Is there a compromise between these ideas? Let’s pick something to try for a month or so.
How should we continue to make space to talk about how to integrate kids in our Community (especially as they grow)?
Communication (3 minutes)
Last brass tacks thing here. We need a platform / way to talk and organize ourselves each week. I’m talking about iMessage (if you’re all in the Apple universe), WhatsApp, GroupMe, Slack, Discord, etc. There are pros and cons to each of these, and in every group there’s at least one person who feels really strongly about one of these. The only platform we don’t recommend is email, because not everyone checks that super often.
Any strong preferences among the group?
Would anyone like to volunteer to be our Communication Coordinator? This person would get us started on a platform, and on an ongoing basis do things like post event reminders and inform the group/recap decisions made on this platform.
Last table thing: Going over any roles we missed (5 minutes)
Quick note about Community Leaders, and a couple other roles: a Mission Coordinator, Food and Hospitality Coordinator, and Communication Coordinator are all really recommended. But other bonus roles might be a birthday coordinator, summer trips coordinator, or others you might think of! You’ll have more opportunities to discuss those.
In the meantime, if you have any interest in leading this Community, stay tuned because there’s a training coming up—and you’re welcome to connect with me for any questions.
In the next few weeks, you’ll be given 4 “primers” to help you in these beginning stages of getting to know one another and learning these rhythms. The four guides you’ll be receiving will walk you through the 3 Community rhythms (Family, Mission, and Discipleship), and then a final guide to walk through the commitments you’ve made. Your group does need someone to facilitate those primers, which, essentially, you can just read. Would anyone be willing to do that for the next month or two? Or perhaps two people?
