Planning a Meeting

Step 1: Identify the needs

1. Pray: place yourself in the presence of God.
2. Grace to pray for: to care for and empower your members to grow in friendship, faith, and service.
   • Jesus’ secret of success is to meet people where they are, identify their needs, and respond to them. At the same time, he empowers them to grow to where God wants them to be.
   • Ask yourself and your co-leader, “Where is our group now?” and “Where does God invite our group to go?”
   • Once you identify their needs, go to the next step.

Step 2: Respond to the needs

1. Keep in mind the fruits of your prayer while you plan the meetings. Your prayers and planning can take place on two levels: (1) the whole quarter, or (2) week by week.
2. Be familiar with the meetings. Read over them carefully and pay special attention to the grace to pray for in each meeting. Make an outline or highlight key points.
3. The meetings are designed with the members’ needs and desires in mind. It is hoped that members will grow through different phases. Thus, you should be familiar and keep in mind the following: CLC Mission and vision, CLC Formation Phases, CLC Meeting format, etc.
4. Different meeting topic? If for some reason your prayer result does not seem to fit with the meeting topic in the CLC Resource Manual, you should read it again carefully and prayerfully. Then discuss with your co-leader and formation team person. This is where the discernment takes place. You might come to the conclusion that your group needs a different meeting topic, which is totally all right. Ultimately, these meetings are only the means to the end: Encountering God.

Step 3: Execute the meeting

1. Execute the plan but be flexible. Sometimes, we plan everything and God takes us in a different direction or goes beyond what we plan. God might surprise us with a different grace. The key is to co-facilitate the meeting with God.
2. Check-in with your group members regularly. Ask them for feedback: Is our group meeting your needs? Are our meetings helpful? What needs to be improved? Etc.

Step 4: Review the meeting

Pray and reflect upon your meetings.

• Did God give us a grace to pray for or something else?
• How did God work during the meetings? What has been helpful? What needs to be improved?
• Are there any topics that the group needs to return to?
• Where does God invite our group to go?