If somebody walked into your meeting room before your students/participants began to arrive, what priorities would they assume? Is your goal interaction or instruction? Is there a hierarchy within the room? Are the chairs all facing one direction? facing each other?
Some small-group directors will call me and say, "We've got four or five small groups in our church, and all they do is socialize." And I say, "Good. Let them just socialize. That's an important part of Christianity. It's an important part of their life." Now, I would guess that if I attended those groups, the homes themselves would be set up in a social way. There would be a lot of food. There would be a lot of room for just standing and talking. There would be couches and chairs set up in little pockets. That's an environment that is conducive to natural connection. But in most small groups, we switch that off and move everyone to a round circle so that eight or ten of us can see each others' faces. But when that happens, you've just changed the environment. Let's be real—none of us sit around in a circle with eight or ten people in the normal course of our lives (unless we're at a business meeting). It's just not a natural way to connect in our culture. So when we gather everyone in a circle after they've been connecting, we're communicating that something is changing. We're doing something different. And after a few times, the group members begin to understand that we're moving into a learning mode—that someone is going to teach us something. That's not a bad thing. We just need to realize that we change the intimacy level when we change the environment.
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