Coaching at RashidatO.com | Social Activism at Whereveryougolove.com
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How can we make it more lucrative to talk about God and hard topics rather than popular culture? I don’t know if it is because I’m the oldest person on my team or if I’m just bad at small talk, but I’m over conversations about Justin Beiber songs, Star Wars, and Settlers of Catan. While I love my team, we have struggled to get past having fun together. We were struggling to continue to go deep together. This is the complete opposite of my last team, so I have pondered the question “how do I bring this to my team and encourage them to join me?”
That was back at the end of Malawi that I felt that way and God has answered that prayer.
In Ukraine, the team started talking about how our conversations lacked depth and we wanted to get deeper. For the most part, that was as far as we got.
During our debrief I got to have a friend date with one of my squad leaders. We shared how we wished that our squad talked about things more. We dreamed about bringing that to squad and what it would look like for that replace our evening sessions during debrief rather than having “preaching” all the time. I commend her because the next day, she stepped out and encouraged our squad to discuss more by asking “is there any discussion about this devotional?” It encouraged me to waste no time and do the same.
In another friend date with my team leader, I told him about the idea and I was grateful that he was on board. We entered our next ministry and I shared this information with my team. Just about everyone was on board, so we threw out some ideas on how to make it happen. We landed on everyone writing controversial topics on small pieces of paper and putting them in an envelope. Every team time we will pull out a topic and discuss it, share our views about it, and ask questions about it.
We’ve gone from team time as a chore to team time as a cool opportunity to discussing hard topics. We have started figuring out what it looks like to have these conversations when we get home. We have been practicing to seek to understand how each of us thinks and feels about a topic. We have expanded the way we relate to each other. We’ve figured out how we bring a part of this communal life back to the States with us when we come.
In a small group or just have a group of friends that like chicken wings? Go out for dinner together and spark up a friendly conversation about some hard topics. The vulnerability is worth the risk!
