Home Groups / Series / We are Satellites Study Guide / Family - Session Five
Family – Session Five
In this session look at how the church is God's amazing plan to include everyone who wants to be a part of his family.
In this fifth session take time to discuss how you tackled the challenge from last week.
In the week ahead, do something that you really enjoy, which you know also honours and pleases God. It could be going for a run, or doing something creative, or spending time doing something for someone else. As you do it, notice that this can be an expression of worship to the God who made you and is part of everything you do.
The word ‘church’ carries lots of associations – both positive and negative. But while we might never have experienced it in this way, the church is God’s amazing plan to include everyone who wants to be a part of his family. We have to be honest and accept that churches haven’t always been safe, kind or particularly inclusive places, and the church as a whole needs to do better than that. As the church’s future, we have an opportunity to build incredible places of belonging and welcome where God’s family can grow and flourish together. God wants to know us as individual and unique
people, but he also wants to know us together, as ‘his people’, who not only worship and meet him together, but also form his taskforce to change the world.
• What’s your experience of churches? Positive, negative, mixed, or something else? What comes to mind when you hear the word
‘church’?
• The earliest church is described on p.75-76. What do you think it would mean to be part of a church like that? Could that kind of church really exist today?
• What do you think about the idea of the church as a family which is helping to make the world a better place? Does that excite you? Does it feel like the church you’ve experienced? If not, how might the church need to change?
• Why do you think some people feel excluded by the Christian family? What needs to change?
• What do you think it means to know God as ‘a people’, not just as individuals?
• “In our family, it’s all about how we love each other.” Why do you think this is so important in the Christian faith?
• Pray for your church (if you are part of one), that it will become more and more like God intends it to be.
• Pray for the people you know (and in your community) who would most benefit from being a part of a church family, that you would find ways of including and inviting them.
• Pray that God would meet with you and speak to you as a group, as well as individually.
This week, take some time to learn about your church. Find a way to get involved differently, or even speak to someone who you’ve never
really met before. (But, obviously, don’t go and meet someone you don’t
know, on your own).
