One of the most common questions I have gotten about class and band meetings since I first started writing about them is some form of this question:
Can you point me to examples of churches that are doing this and are bearing fruit?
This is an important question and one that I admit I have felt frustrated by my own inability to answer well. At one level, I know that many churches are being blessed by a return to Wesleyan small group formation. I know this because I hear stories from people of what God is doing in their churches every time I speak somewhere. But I hear most of these stories in quick conversations at times when I am not able to stop and write down the details.
So, I want to ask you for help capturing stories of where these groups are being used. And I want to share one recent concrete example of a church that I have seen returning to something like the class meeting with initial success.
If your church has implemented something like class meetings or band meetings recently and seen fruit, would you please share that below? And if you know someone who has done this in their church, would you please pass this on to them and ask them to share what they have seen God do?
Here is my example: On August 25, I got to preach in a sermon series on “Relational Revival” at Christ United Methodist Church in Mobile, AL. The series was aimed at teaching about the importance of community for the Christian life and the way that small groups have been of particular significance for the Methodist/Wesleyan tradition.
This is one of the best experiences I’ve ever had preaching. It was such a gift to me to be invited to preach the week that they invited people to sign up to join what they refer to as “Life Groups,” which are basically Wesleyan class meetings.
You can watch the sermon here:
Rev. Bobbi Lassiter, the pastor of Discipleship at Christ United, told me that 229 people signed up for groups within the first week of signups. 229 people! This is a testament to how healthy this church already is. It is also a credit to the leadership at Christ UMC for coming up with such a thoughtful on-ramp to taking a risk in faith to try something new. The four week sermon series gave the congregation the opportunity to hear from their pastors about why they were convinced that this is a key step that the people in their churches ought to take.
This is one of the best launches to a class meeting drive I have seen.
I wanted to lift this up to you as a concrete example of a place that is seeking to launch these groups in a thoughtful and bold way.
God has changed my life through Wesleyan class and band meetings. Seeing others experience similar blessings through these groups has been the highlight of my ministry.
I hear from pastors and lay leaders of these groups all the time that they would like to be able to hear from people who have already started these groups. I need your help. The Class Meeting has been more successful than I had dared to hope when I wrote it. My intention was for the book to be able to be a tool for starting these groups. But I haven’t done as good of a job of capturing stories of where God is using class meetings to bless people as I would like.
Are you at a church that has implemented something like the class meeting and is finding success? If so, would you please take a moment to leave a comment?
If you are willing to be contacted by people who are just starting to implement these groups and have practical questions about what you have done, would you please send me an email at vitalpiety@gmail.com. Please include your name, the name and address of the church where you are serving, and a very brief summary of your experience with these groups.
I hope this can be a small step towards building a network of people who are committed to returning to real Methodism and learning from each other as we go. So, please, no false humility. Will you please take a moment to share what God is doing in your church so that others can see examples of where this is happening?
Thank you for your help!
Kevin M. Watson is a professor at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He teaches, writes, and preaches to empower community, discipleship, and stewardship of our heritage. Click here to get future posts emailed to you. Affiliate links used in this post.
Kevin M. Watson 
We launched LifeGroups last year with over 10% of our Sunday worship population s signing up for a group. We are in the midst of our send phase and seeing increased interest with our younger families. These groups have seen lives transformed. People are changing the pattern of their lives so they won’t miss their group time . I just heard of a 25 year old woman who worked a 14 hour day and still went to her group because it was so important to her.
Hello Kevin, Our little company is not UMC or ‘methodist church’. However, we adopted the plans of Mr. Wesley’s class meetings and societies, following the old general rule. It began with the private baptism of our sons, inviting friends, about two years ago, to a Love Feast at our house. At the Feast, a visiting deacon, Mr. Fargo (a moderate and generous Presbyterian), volunteered and encouraged others to ‘go the next step’ by keep regular class meetings. Since then, Mr. Fargo has become our leader-in-meeting. We are three families involved beside the Presbyterian one– a Mormon home as well as an Anglican householder. So, our meeting is interdenominational and we follow the original scheme of the methodist people as closely as possible asking these three questions, “Have you kept the Ordinances of God, have you done no harm to neighbor, and have you done good to men?” Altogether, church attendance, daily scripture reading, closet & family prayer, journal-keeping (so we can develop testimonies given tribulation), and works of mercy have drastically improved. Thus, the Kingdom of God extends itself by simple brethren stirring faith, carrying burdens, and Heavenly Father quickening our souls by similar means. In our small group we’ve also held Covenant Services (following Wesley’s Directions) on New Years, and hoping to renew our heavenly marriage vows also this coming Halloween. Our small company meets near San Jose California. We’ve been trying to find other class meetings of a similar inclination, and less than a year ago found Pastor Glen Haworth at the Font church in southern CA,. In fact, Rev. Haworth drew my attention to this post and asked we send an email to you (Dr. Watson). We have a special love for early-methodism and Wesley’s societal plan– even avoiding church hours with our meetings and abstaining from the administration of sacraments unless a properly ordained man is available. I am also in the process of getting a set of bylaws approved– the relevant parts taken directly from the 1801 MEC discipline– for my tiny Anglican denomination, the United Episcopal Church (UEC), getting recognition as a Primitive Methodist within it. Here are some links for those interested regarding our on-goings:
Class Rule Page. https://anglomethodist.com/class-meetings/
UEC Local Community: https://www.fremontanglicans.com/
Jehovah Bless, C. Bartlett
We’re about to begin a journey of creating an intentional discipleship system completely focused on small groups as a two-fold vehicle: They will be micro-groups (4-5 people) that study and share together, but also serve together. We’re convinced that the key is to eventually have every single ministry happening in the church occurring through a small group. If a small group does not want to own the ministry, it is a statement that the church does not really want to do the ministry. This, we believe, will protect against unnecessary complexity in the church, burnout from people taking on too much, and create a high level of accountability for our ministries. To be continued…
In September, 2018, a small group of members of our church came together to study Dr. Watson’s book The Class Meeting. Subsequently, everyone in the study group elected to continue meeting following the format, as closely as we could, of the early Wesleyan Class meeting outlined in Dr. Watson’s book. The following quotation is from an email a group member sent to the lead pastor of our church after four months of participation in this small group.
“I was happy to hear you calling up the Class Meeting in last Sunday’s sermon. As a member of our first Class Meeting group I have come to draw strength from the group in their discussions of their personal faith and well being. In the beginning I was wondering if I could earnestly speak of my relationship with God but I was able to do so as did the others in the group.
As you would expect, the group has become a place to bring our concerns and fears and setbacks. We share these and pray for our individual concerns and how we take these to God. I say again, it has been a strengthening experience for me even in the short time we’ve been together.”
I am happy to report that this group continues weekly meetings supporting each other in our spiritual journeys.
Want to add something. In our northern California group we spent a lot of time on inquiring upon our ordinances to God, improving them to nearly a daily practice (family prayer, closet, and reading scripture,plus regular church attendance). Since then, our class leader has spent more time seeing we ‘do good to all men, both body and soul’, and the result has been each person starting their own outreach– some with feeding the homeless, encouraging the sick, and visiting the elderly, even orphans. In light, I’ve now realize how powerful the class meeting can be as an engine for building the Kingdom of God. It first sets to secure the inward Kingdom (ordinances plus avoiding all sin), and then (once the inward heads are implemented) it expands the outward by a multiplication of good works from each member. Eventually, you get to a point (under the head of doing good to others) where bibles, tracts, food, clothes, and visits are counted or taken each person every weekly meeting. This can become very powerful, not only in a group of 10 or 12 people, but even in a circuit where classes are relatively close to one another– every class doing the same and bearing fruit. I can see, even in our small group of five in norCalif, how a fully populated society with six or more fully populated classes (12 to 20 apiece) could set a city or county region ablaze.
Also, we finally got our class registered as a society or ‘religious community’ in our tiny, particular Anglican denomination as “Primitive Methodists (UECNA- West)”. Our bylaws are simply the old societal Wesleyan rules and discipline, gleaming as much as we could of the Old Plan. https://www.fremontanglicans.com/society.html