Kevin Watson asks whether other churches do a better job on small groups than United Methodists do. His post touches specifically on the life groups of LifeChurch.tv.
My experience with small groups and life groups is somewhat limited, but what I have seen does not remind me of the band societies as I have read about them. Perhaps I am being too narrow in my categories here, but the band societies and class meetings of early Methodism were narrowly organized around accountability and watching over each other in love.
They were not book study or Bible study groups. They were not fellowship groups in the sense of general sharing. They were not about sharing common interests like cooking or dancing.
They were places where the state of your soul was the focus and topic of every meeting.
At every band meeting, every member was to be asked at least the following four questions:
- What known sins have you committed sin our last meeting?
- What temptations have you met with?
- How were you delivered?
- What have you thought, said, or done of which you doubt whether it be sin or not?
I have no idea whether Wesleyan bands and classes are the way Methodism should go these days, but I’d argue we should not imagine we are recreating Wesley’s methods with contemporary small groups.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
Hi John,
Thank you for linking to my post.
I just left a response to your comment on my blog, so I will try not to be redundant here.
The main initial comment I would make is that I think that there is a big difference between classes and bands, and you seem to talk about the two in this post as if they were the same. The classes were mandatory for a period of time and involved a lesser degree of accountability than the bands. In particular, they did not require confession of specific sins. In other words, to my knowledge the questions you have cited here were not asked at class meetings. The bands, because of this deep level of vulnerability and intimacy were never mandatory, though Wesley did frequently exhort people to join one. I should have been more specific in my original post that I was seeing a potential parallel between the class meeting and LifeGroups and not the band meeting.
I really appreciate you linking to the description of LifeGroups… and in reading that, I notice that nowhere in the description does it say that the pattern of the groups is going through a study. It does say the goal is to challenge each other to be more like Christ. Of course that can mean different things to different people, and whether they actually do challenge each other to be more like Christ is another question. But their description actually makes me even more interested in whether these groups could be seen as a contemporary parallel to the early Methodist class meeting. It does not appear to me that they are marketing them as a Sunday School class at all, at least as I understand the typical approach to Sunday School – where there is some informational content that is the central focus of the time spent together as a group.
I would be very interested to get Groeschel’s take on this… because I may be reading to much into this. But it seems to me that these are conceived as an alternative to Sunday School.
Thanks for the double responses, Kevin. I think I replied as best I can at your blog. So, I’ll not clutter up the Internet with the same chatter here.