It was a surprise one day to find I was responsible for resourcing our church's Home Groups - and as usual there wasn't much already in place. There were also some particular challenges - financial, geographical, organisational and our rather unusual community (educated and keen, but highly mobile and with many other calls on their busy lives.)
I grabbed whatever I could find in Christian stores and on the internet, but a lot of it seemed to either to cost a lot or not be very appealing - at least to 'our people'. So I set out to create and compile a stock of good material in a respectable format ... and here it is: material to support home and study groups, prayer, some other courses and various other activities ... and available to anyone, any churches, anywhere. What's here has all come either from freely-available material on the internet, or I've written it myself, or I've had some help from AI which I'm free to share - so it's free to use.
It's all in PDF format, which should make it easy to share in soft-copy. As for printing, a lot of it is in 14-point font, which prints rather large on A4. This may help those with failing eyesight, but the main reason for this choice is that it makes nice A5 booklets if you can get your friendly printer or photocopier to collaborate. Best of luck with that!
When groups only meet fortnightly for 5-session 'terms' and then take a break (and some members go away altogether over the winter) it's not really an option to do heavy stuff like '26 studies on Romans' - not to mention that published material costs about $20 a copy, so the members balk at paying for it and so does the church. And it wouldn't be right to photocopy copyrighted material, would it ...
But our people do get to [a] church most Sundays, so it made sense to pick up on what they had already heard and might even still be thinking about. The Sunday Readings provided a fixed point in our rather imperfect system.
Studies for Sunday Readings Year A (Advent 2025-26)
Studies for Sunday Readings Year B (Advent 2026-27)
Studies for Sunday Readings Year C (Advent 2027-28)
It turned out I was also responsible for creating, instiling and even enforcing what you might call A Rule of Life. I made little progress with instiling and enforcing, but I did get a base set of booklets written under the name Pattern (Rule) of Life.
I also picked up responsibility for running a CPAS Growing Leaders course. This did not go well ... so I'm afraid it earned the name Groaning Leaders.
Various resources for Prayer, particularly in a church setting (e.g. regular topics, or 'doing the intercessions').
Guidance and help on Reading and Understanding the Bible (lots of my own materials)
Lots more study material from many sources, mainly drawn from SPCK's excellent homegroups.co.uk
A series of talks on The Creeds and Lent Studies (though these seem increasingly distant)
Anything else I can think of