Leading a group is easier than you may think. The Leaders Guide will help you prepare for and facilitate meetings. The Guide is packed with tips and supplementary information.
You can click here to sample pages of the Leaders Guide or click here to buy it online.
Feedback has told us that you’ll have fun, laugh a lot and learn a lot. It has been interesting to note that it is particularly the leaders who have benefited as they steer their groups through the sessions.
We recommend that you work together with your partner as a “leader couple” to:
- Invite other couples to join your group.
- Organise a time and place to meet.
- Start meetings with an informal time, possibly supper or sharing a meal together. If you don’t wish to provide this yourselves then others may want to help, either from within the group or from your church.
- Facilitate the meetings, which simply means asking the questions and encouraging participation. You will not need to teach because Together is designed so that couples teach themselves.
- Manage the time so you start promptly and finish on time.
How to lead the group
You may decide to lead all the sessions yourself or to give other couples in your group a chance to lead. This can be very positive, giving people a sense of shared responsibility. If other couples aren’t ready to share the leadership from the start then consider encouraging them to lead a session later on, once the group has settled down. The Leader’s Guide is designed so it can be used as a personal workbook i.e. to fill in Couple Time preparation boxes and complete Couple Time action points. However, if you intend to rotate the leadership of the group then you may prefer to have your own copy of a Together workbook for your personal stuff and pass around the Leader’s Guide(s).
You will need to invite three or four couples to make up a group. Tell them a bit about Together and explain that the first meeting is an Introductory Session to give people some ideas of what Together is all about without any obligation to do the whole study. The Introductory Session is a ‘taster’ – it is less structured and there is no Bible discussion or Introductory Reading assignment. But it will help couples ‘dip their toe in the water’ as well as understand the format of future meetings. You can hand out invitations and point people to this website.
If the same couple are leaders throughout the course:
Each participant will need a copy of the workbook and ideally the leaders would have a copy of the Leaders Guide. Having two copies of the Leaders Guide will help during parts of the course where the group splits into male and female small groups but isn't 100% necessary.
If the leadership of the course is split between all the participants:
Each participant would need their own copy of the workbook and then one, or ideally two, Leaders Guides, should be used to pass from one couple to the next as they lead it.