Suggestions for Using Living with Christ in a Faith-Sharing Group or Small Christian Community (SCC)
Faith-Sharing resources are an essential part of Living with Christ’s monthly helps for living and growing in a biblically-based, eucharist-centered spirituality that you can share with others. Each month we offer resources for two meetings called Exploring the Scriptures.
Faith-Sharing Groups: At the Heart of Being Church
We sometimes forget that our present experience of Church is something that has taken two thousand years to develop. With millions of members today, the structures and challenges of being Church are much different than they were in the first few centuries.
But despite these changes, the essential experiences that make us Church must find ways to be expressed in every age: Community (koinonia), Prayer (leitourgia), Proclamation (kerygma) and outreach or service (diakonia).
The Early Church Met in Houses
For the first three centuries when Christianity was not a legal religion, its weekly eucharistic gathering was held in households. This gathering followed the normal practices of a festive meal. First was the shared food, followed by social time together. For Christians, this social time was devoted not to entertainment but to prayer, scripture reading, teaching and applying their learning to their lives. Everyone was invited to participate in this experience, as is clear when Paul notes that in Corinth “When you assemble, one has a psalm, another an instruction, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Everything should be done for building up” (1 Cor 14:26).
As the sacred dimension of the meal grew in importance, the regular meal became more ritualized and the meal was shifted to the end after the more formalized communal sharing.
Gathering in Homes Today
As the Church has grown in size, the difficulty arises about how so many are to participate in the eucharistic liturgy. Especially in the last hundred years as our world has gone through a major shift from small rural towns to huge cities, parishes have become very large and sharing our ideas about the scriptures and applying them to our life has not been possible within the eucharistic ritual as we now celebrate it.
Over the last few decades in many parishes, there has been an attempt to provide a forum for faith sharing that harkens back to the early Church’s household gatherings. By gathering in smaller groups, Christians can recapture some of the participatory quality of the early Church’s household gatherings.
These gatherings are not meant to replace the eucharist, but rather to offer one another the support and help for living with Christ during the rest of the week. Our faith-sharing gatherings are also designed so that we touch on each of the basic characteristics of being Church. When we gather, we support one another by building up our community relationships, then we take time for praying together. Following our prayer, we listen to God’s Word and share our responses with one another. Finally, we decide how we will take this message beyond our group to our everyday lives where it can be translated into Christlike service.
Our hope is that the two faith-sharing gatherings that we offer each month will help you deepen your experience of God’s Word and make your celebration of the eucharist even richer.
Faith-Sharing Groups: At the Heart of Being Church
We sometimes forget that our present experience of Church is something that has taken two thousand years to develop. With millions of members today, the structures and challenges of being Church are much different than they were in the first few centuries.
But despite these changes, the essential experiences that make us Church must find ways to be expressed in every age: Community (koinonia), Prayer (leitourgia), Proclamation (kerygma) and outreach or service (diakonia).
The Early Church Met in Houses
For the first three centuries when Christianity was not a legal religion, its weekly eucharistic gathering was held in households. This gathering followed the normal practices of a festive meal. First was the shared food, followed by social time together. For Christians, this social time was devoted not to entertainment but to prayer, scripture reading, teaching and applying their learning to their lives. Everyone was invited to participate in this experience, as is clear when Paul notes that in Corinth “When you assemble, one has a psalm, another an instruction, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Everything should be done for building up” (1 Cor 14:26).
As the sacred dimension of the meal grew in importance, the regular meal became more ritualized and the meal was shifted to the end after the more formalized communal sharing.
Gathering in Homes Today
As the Church has grown in size, the difficulty arises about how so many are to participate in the eucharistic liturgy. Especially in the last hundred years as our world has gone through a major shift from small rural towns to huge cities, parishes have become very large and sharing our ideas about the scriptures and applying them to our life has not been possible within the eucharistic ritual as we now celebrate it.
Over the last few decades in many parishes, there has been an attempt to provide a forum for faith sharing that harkens back to the early Church’s household gatherings. By gathering in smaller groups, Christians can recapture some of the participatory quality of the early Church’s household gatherings.
These gatherings are not meant to replace the eucharist, but rather to offer one another the support and help for living with Christ during the rest of the week. Our faith-sharing gatherings are also designed so that we touch on each of the basic characteristics of being Church. When we gather, we support one another by building up our community relationships, then we take time for praying together. Following our prayer, we listen to God’s Word and share our responses with one another. Finally, we decide how we will take this message beyond our group to our everyday lives where it can be translated into Christlike service.
Our hope is that the two faith-sharing gatherings that we offer each month will help you deepen your experience of God’s Word and make your celebration of the eucharist even richer.
