A Dinner Group is made up of 6-12+ people who meet once a month at someone's home. The goal of a Dinner Group is to provide a place for people to have fellowship, to help them feel like they belong and to have their faith encouraged. Each time you meet, you'll have dinner together and end your night with prayer.

We would encourage you to invite one or two friends or families to your group to start. We will also send people to you who live near you and would be a good fit according to the group preferences you've given us. When we pass people along, you can personally reach out to them and invite them to your dinners. Our hope is that the same group of people would meet each month and grow in their relationships with one another.

Each night should be about one and a half to two hours long. If dinner is ready soon after all of the guests arrive, this should be plenty of time to chat, eat and pray at the end of the night.

You don't have to be responsible for all of the dinner. When people say they are coming to your group, you can invite them to bring a side, dessert, or drinks. For something like this, most people like to be able to bring something to share. A great tool to use to simplify this process is SignUpGenius. This free tool allows you to make a sign up for dinner and then invite people to see it and sign up for specific items to bring. When your group gets comfortable, you can talk about other people making the main dish or even hosting the group at their house from time to time.

This all depends on your group. We would suggest you start with dinner. If people are open to a weekend breakfast, a cookout or a picnic-that is a great way to eat together as well. The same time of relationship building and prayer can happen regardless of the time of day.

This will really depend on your group. Over a meal, childcare is rarely needed. You can have the kids join you for the meal or eat at their own table. Once they are finished, you can have the kids go and play in another room, watch a movie or find another activity for them to keep themselves busy.

In the preference form, you would let us know if you are open to kids coming to the Dinner Group.

You will receive a training for the online tool we use to manage our groups called Planning Center Online. This site and accompanying app allows you to easily message your whole group regularly. Once you are together, you could decide to start a text message group, Facebook group or use another method that works for everyone.

We would hope many groups would meet 12 times over the course of a year. We would ask you to try it out for at least 6 months to allow people to settle in and start to feel comfortable. We know that circumstances in life change sometimes and if you need to end your group earlier, you can let us know.

There are no perfect people besides Jesus-and therefore no perfect Dinner Groups. While we don't foresee major conflicts in happening in groups, if you have questions or concerns, you can always reach out to Pastor Andrew. His email is andrew@cometoconnect.com

At the beginning of each month, you will have a simple group guide emailed to you. It will give you some guidelines to help you setup the night, one or two questions you can ask to guide the conversation and then ideas for prayer at the end of the night. This is a resource to help you feel confident for the night.

You can approach the prayer time in many different ways. You could have people share prayer requests and then pray over all of them the first time you are together. You can have different people pray over the requests. You could have everyone fill out an index card with a request and have different people pray over them. You could also have people break up into smaller groups to pray together. Each month, you'll receive some ideas in the group guide.

We ask you not to serve alcohol or have it present at your Dinner Group. As a church, we do not believe drinking alcohol is a sin or forbidden in Scripture. It is clear in Scripture that getting drunk is a sin and that alcohol could be a matter of conscience for many people. We see examples in 1 Corinthians 8 where Christians had different convictions and could create a point of contention. Having this policy will remove unnecessary hindrances for the people in your group.