Last night (Wednesday March 07) I went to a church group for college-age people as my small group speaking event. I felt a little out of place since most of the people there are regular attendants and I am not. But everyone greeted me when I came in with my sister and quite a few people introduced themselves. The first 15 minutes seemed to be reserved for social interaction and during that amount of time I didn't even know who the leader of this group was because everyone seemed to be about the same age and the group was not very diverse.
When the meeting got started everyone (there was about 12-15 of us) sat at a very large table where we would be able to interact with one another. There had been an assigned passage reading from the Bible, which of course I had not read. It was Exodus 15:2; "The LORD is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise him, my father's God, and I will exalt him." We discussed different interpretations of the verse and focused on the concept of what salvation really means. It seemed to me that the young pastor leading this group was not so much a "speaker" as I had seen in past speaking events but a prompting participant. When the group became silent where we seemed to be "stuck" he would clarify in order to get the discussion started again. This small group gets together to solve problems that come along with living a Christian lifestyle, specifically for the college-age person. I would suspect that many small groups are formed to problem-solve but the church group takes it a step further than say a corperation's small group and forms a support system for each individual. I did not know anyone in the group besides my sister but I felt very comfortable sharing some of my own basic beliefs with these people.