Recently, my husband and I had dinner with a Christian couple from another state. We feel like we have known them forever and technically we have known them for almost a decade now. The truth is that although we feel really close to them, we have only spent a few hours together a few times a year. So why do we feel so close?
Yes, we have many things in common – in large part due to our shared faith. I believe there is another reason that can help the various constituencies in your ministry. Our times together are spent sitting around a table sharing a meal. We have shared our hearts as we ate together. As a result our bonds grew stronger each time.
You may be thinking that you provide food at your events all the time and you don’t see any bonding happening. There are a few tweaks you can make that should improve the connections made any time there is a gathering with food involved.
- Have students work together to prepare the food. Have them come early and make pizzas from scratch or make pancakes and breakfast for dinner or prepare ingredients and set up a potato or taco bar or make the desserts for the night.
- Set up either one really long table or lots of eating areas that only seat three or four people.
- Mix it up. Find fun ways to sit different people next to each other every time.
- Have at least one common bond question and one dream question each group needs to find the answers for during the time they are eating together. Make the bonding questions silly – like the craziest thing you’ve ever eaten. Even if they never figure out the answer they all have in common, they will have fun talking about it. The dream questions should be hopeful and forward thinking – like creating the perfect youth group, outreach ministry, service project, personal godly dreams, etc. These questions encourage exposing their hearts to each other and deeper bonds.
- Bonus: Share one positive character type trait you discovered about the people in your group. This is a great thing to periodically encourage groups to do at the end of the exercise – especially when they are paired up with people they don’t know well. Make sure the expectation is clear – these should be positive internal qualities they discovered – not that they liked someone’s shoes or hair. You don’t need to do this every time, but your teens can probably benefit from hearing something positive from their peers periodically.
Find more ways to get together the various constituencies in your ministry for meals. For adults, encourage them to make and bring a favorite dish from childhood or their favorite homemade dessert they learned about from someone else. This encourages story telling and sharing little pieces of their hearts, too. Adults can also benefit from having some of the conversation starters you use with your students – especially if they are introverted.
Have fun with it, but get everyone eating together. It’s probably why the early communion times in the first century of the church were actual meals – it drew them closer to each other and God.