Does you want to increase the quality, depth, and disciple-making influence of the friendships within your church? If so, hosting a Transformative Friendships Conference is an excellent option.
Transformative Friendships is built around seven simple questions that provide a conversational roadmap for deepening friendships and facilitating spiritual growth.
The conference can be hosted as a Friday night and Saturday morning event or as a full day event on a Saturday. The teaching time is built around three primary sessions.
Session One: Discipleship Questions – What’s Good? What’s Hard? and What’s Bad? These questions outline the basics of discipleship. We learn to use simple questions to spur one another on in the good plans God has for each other’s life, comfort one another amid the hard (suffering) parts of life, and encourage one another to forsake the bad (sin) that so easily entices us. In this session, we learn how to be good friends who navigate what it means to simultaneously be a saint, sinner, and sufferer.
Session Two: Foundational Question – What’s Your Story? When the average American moves 11 times during their life, this question is becoming more important. We tend to only know soundbites and highlights from each other’s lives. That exacerbates the sense of loneliness that permeates our culture and undermines the way God intends our friendships to advance our discipleship. Taking time to learn to the story of people in your small group, Sunday school class, or ministry team will exponentially increase how these relationships enrich your walk with Christ.
Session Three: Maturational Questions – What’s Fun? What’s Stuck? and What’s Next? High school or college should not be the greatest four years of our life. Unfortunately, for too many people, they are. Friendship is the natural place for maturation to occur. We mature by finding forms of fun that match our current season of life, identifying the parts of our life that have become stuck (i.e., a lifeless rut), and pursuing the dreams and passions that God has for us next. The best way to cement these maturational processes is to intentionally engage them with our friends.
Optional: Q&A – Often churches add a Question-and-Answer time to these three sessions. It is wonderful to have pastors or other church leaders participate in a panel discussion. Having the voice of church leaders in the Q&A can be an effective way to help church members identify the ministry and social opportunities in their church where the principles of Transformative Friendships are most naturally applied.
Optional: Sunday Sermon or Final Session – Moses, Deteriorating Friendships, and Regret (Numbers 20:1-13). If a church wants a church-wide culmination to their Transformative Friendship Conference, this sermon highlights the human side of Moses’ life. As distance grew in Moses’ closest friendships (e.g., Aaron and Miriam), it correlated with the greatest disappointments and regrets in his life. Seeing the incredible ways that God used Moses, the way deteriorating friendships contributed to his demise, and how Moses was still recognized in the Hebrews 11 Hall of Faith can be a sobering and encouraging conclusion to this conference.
The Transformative Friendship Conference is designed to be easy for your church to host and provides members with a way to begin developing more meaningful friendships during and after the event. If your church is interested in hosting this conference, please visit www.bradhambrick.com/events to identify dates that may be available and to download my FAQ sheet for scheduling external events.
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