House Groups

Last night at youth group we met in house groups. This was our second attempt to gather in each others' houses in lieu of meeting at church. We kept the same house groups and leaders, but 3 of the 4 groups changed houses. Each house group is meant to be a grade level, but there are a few students who feel more connected to other grades, so I've openly allowed them to switch groups if they want to.

The week prior to house groups I send home a postcard to each person, reminding/inviting them to the house group. It has a map and description of the evening on the postcard, and of course each card is color-coded for the grade level. The four house group hosts are usually easy to find, but this week I felt I needed to help our freshman group so I offered to host it at my house.

Of course each house group has several capable leaders, great leaders in fact! Most of the groups have a musical person in the group who volunteers to play guitar, and I've arranged the ice breaker games, Bible study, and other activities in advance, putting all supplies and resources in a bag for each house group.

Since I was the host, I tried to be a host-like as possible. I allowed the other leaders to lead and participated when I needed to, but also excused myself from the group when needed as well. Actually being a host was a lot of fun, so hard to keep my mouth shut, but really fun.

The hard part of house groups is that I essentially create 4 ice breakers each week, because the house groups are all so different in number and dynamic. But this week I chose a few board games, and I think they all worked out pretty well. My house group played the game of things, two house groups played a game called Kalimaat, and the other group played a game called the perfect present. All the games were good and we will probably just flip flop games next time.

The Bible study was good to hear and be a part of. Philippians 1:1-11 is an encouraging section that has all kinds of options to talk about joy or happiness, and amazing acts of love. In my house group the leaders each took a portion of the evening to lead, so one person led the game, anther the Bible study and a third led the picture poses. It was a great strategy (one I had hoped for when we assigned leaders) but it was a little difficult because no one was moving things along.

The last part of the evening was called picture poses. each group was given a camera and asked to take 30 pictures of their group posing in different ways. These were all mostly silly (embarassed, hungry, just spotted a celebrity) but the kids really responded well and LOVED taking photos together. The goal of the game was that a judge (like myself) would be able to look at the photo and guess correctly the pose, but it was more difficult than it seemed!