Doing Life

If you have never read Donald Miller you should check out his book "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years." It is a great book about living in a larger story.

On his blog today he wrote:

"Yesterday, at lunch, my friend David mentioned he’d spent some time in Colorado with the guys at Ransomed Heart. David used to work with them and went back to hang out with them for a weekend in the mountains. He mentioned that one of the guys reminded him that spirituality was not a context. I asked David what the guy meant, and Dave said what he meant was that you learn about God while learning to fly a plane or raising a child or planting crops in a field. It’s not a hard, fast rule to be sure, but the idea is that sitting around looking at your spiritual belly button isn’t going to provide an object lesson for your faith. The idea is that faith makes sense in the context of some other pursuit.

And that might be the reason I don’t migrate toward conversations specifically about faith.

In the Bible, God guides people through stories. Stories is how He teaches people about themselves and Himself. He doesn’t get the children of Israel out of Egypt instantly. God drags it out, creates plagues, guides them through positive and negative turns, all to shape their faith. He does the same with Joseph, giving him a vision, then immediately letting him be thrown into a well by his brothers.

If we think we are going to grow in faith by sitting around at a Bible study, we are wrong. That stuff is fine, but without a story, without diving into something really difficult, something that requires us to look to God for support and wisdom and comfort, it will be more difficult to become a person of great faith."

I think Donald Miller is spot on with these observations and I struggle how it applies to small group. In one way, the quote verifies why we do small groups and not bible studies. The content of groups should be the lives of group members with the discussion of Scripture to bring guidance and wisdom to the people in the group so that members see Scripture as living and active. God's word is ultimately to be lived out in us.

On the other hand, I think to grow with other believers we must do more than sit in a circle, as much as I believe in it. In his book, Miller says something along the lines that men don't really grow to trust each other unless they face danger together. I don't know how that gets applied to groups, but there is some application. Somehow we need to not just talk to each other but put our lives in the hands of the group members around us.

I have no easy answer to this. For now, I'm content to let it sit there. I'd love to hear any thoughts from others. I'd also like to hear from women and what they think connects them to each other.