Author: Jonathan Dodson

When Christians come together for weekly gatherings, we create a unique context for sharing life and truth. Unlike any other cultural gathering, this time allows people to combine the following elements: celebrate life, eat together, enjoy one another, and share the truth in love.

Gather to Share the Gospel

Missional community gatherings are not a time to check off the spiritual list or to be a wallflower. Rather, the Christian community gathers together to share common and uncommon struggles with a common hope in the truth of the gospel. It’s an incredible opportunity to pause in the middle of a busy week and remind ourselves that we are the church, an imperfect people clinging to a perfect Christ, being perfected together by the Spirit.

City Group gatherings are intended to foster substantive community and priestly ministry to one another. We should view them, not with dread but anticipation, adjusting our attitudes during our drive to one another’s homes, eagerly hoping to give and receive the gospel from one another. It is a time to be encouraged in Christ by one another. Graham Benyon puts it like this:

“We are to be teaching each other the gospel, to be correcting each other about the gospel with all wisdom, to be singing about the gospel with gratitude and so letting it dwell richly among us. When we come to church on a Sunday, or to our small group meeting during the week, we should come saying to ourselves, ‘I hope I will be reminded of the gospel in this meeting. I hope I will be taught about it and corrected in my understanding of it. I hope we will sing about it.”

– God’s New Community, 119.

This is precisely what sets Christian community apart from any other gathering in our week. It is a gathering, not around rules, or goals, or ourselves at the center, but a gathering around Jesus. We huddle, not around our sin or success, but around our Savior. City Group gatherings are a time of Jesus-centered or Gospel-centered community.

Continued from How to Have Gospel Conversations (Pt 1), (Pt 2). I have adapted a mantra for gospel conversation and counseling from David Powlison which follows three movements: 1) Listen to Their Story 2) Discern Their Story 3) Redemptively Retell Their Story. Once you have listened and discerned someone’s story, you gain the knowledge, understanding and credibility to redemptively retell their story. Here are several ways to do that:

Redemptively Retell their Story

Apply the Gospel to Your Own Story

• Be a Lead Repenter. It is important that the leader be a “lead repenter” when answering heart-penetrating questions. This does not mean you are always the first to answer the question; however, it does mean that you come to the gathering ready to share how the Spirit has lead you into repentance in your own life. Lead repenting begins at home in your heart and naturally carries over in how you lead during gatherings. Be bold with your brokenness and invite words of correction and encouragement.
  • Confess Your Own Sin & Idolatry: ask for prayer, help, encouragement
  • Apply the Gospel to Yourself: So often we become focused on discerning the wounds and cracks in others hearts that we forget to apply the gospel to our own hearts first. EX: Parenting. Let your CG see you apply the healing balm of the gospel to your own wounds. This will dissolve a self-righteous hierarchy as well as show them how to apply the gospel to their own lives.

• Lead with Grace. In redemptively retelling others’ stories the goal is not to publically rebuke, but rather, to graciously point them through their circumstances to Christ in the midst of their struggle.

Ways to Lead with the Gospel

Listen and Empathize with a person’s story and then Retell their story back to them but with a twist of redemption. Don’t take sides, but infuse the Redeemer’s Story into their life.  Do it in a fresh way that reveals that Jesus is not a wonder cure, but that he is crucial and concrete to her life. Show how Jesus is the only key to fit the lock of their problems. How then can we redemptively retell their story? How can we lead people well in the Gospel?

• Sometimes say Nothing. At times, no words are needed. While sharing a person will often verbally correct their wrong motives and actions. If that is the case, you can simply affirm them in their conclusions and point them to Jesus who is sufficient for their failures and strong for their successes. See Christ, not hear Christ.

• Graciously expose Lies. Ask them if there is a lie they might believing. As sin surfaces, it is very tempting to either shift the blame or dismiss the sin.

• Blame-shifting. We are often tempted to lay blame on our circumstances. For instance, we might blame our sexual sin or over-eating on the absence of a girlfriend/boyfriend or spouse. We might explain our anger by saying “It’s the Kids fault. Childcare situation.” Angry or depressed because you aren’t marred, so you say: “There are too many married people in this group/church. No one my age.” When blame shifting occurs, you can ask the group in general “Do guys really think Jane is gossiping because she only has one trusted friend?”
• Sin-skirting. As a community that speaks the truth in love, we have an obligation to not allow one another to skirt sin, to glaze with moralism or indifference. For example: “Yeah, I’d be angry too.” “It will get better.” “Don’t be a doormat!”

In order to make the gospel turn from listening and discerning the heart, we have to point one another to a better God, a better promise, a superior Savior. At this point in the conversation, draw the community’s attention to the gospel in the passage.

• Point to Gospel Promises & Stories
  • How does our passage address your heart issues? Look for heart, idol, lie, deceit, worship, passion, love language.
  • What alternative promise does Scripture offer us? Jesus is a better Satisfaction, Intimacy, Joy, Defender, Advocate, Lover, Counselor.
  • Can you think of any Bible stories, parables, promises or truths that would help us here?
  • How does the gospel address this?
  • How does Jesus supplant and replace our idol of success? We know Jesus is better but “How”?
  • How is Jesus better than X?

• The Four G’s (from You Can Change, Chester)

• 1. God is Great so we don’t have to be in control
• 2. God is Glorious so we don’t have to fear others
• 3. God is Good so we don’t have to look elsewhere
• 4. God is Gracious so we don’t have to prove ourselves