The Class Meeting: Reclaiming a Forgotten (and Essential) Small Group Experience

by Kevin Watson

it made me wonder if the key factors in successfully starting new small groups are low Christian commitment and hobbies that members already have. If the vision for small groups is this shallow, how can they be considered a driver of congregational vitality? Is there a difference between the body of Christ and a social club with people in it? I believe that there is and that we must cast a more robust vision for small groups within a Christian context.

Information-driven groups comprise the second type of small groups. These groups are focused on conveying information and are organized by a common curriculum.

In these groups, members gather together to learn more about their faith. An assumption of these groups is that knowledge is essential for maturity of faith, or that right living is dependent on right knowing. In my experience, this is the kind of group most people have in mind when they think about a small group. At their best, these groups push participants to apply what they are learning to their lives. At their worst, they can be poorly conceived and organized and have no impact on the way group members actually live.

The third type of small groups are transformation-driven groups. These groups focus not on discussion or mastery of content, but on changed lives, on group members’ experience of God.

These groups are primarily focused on living and not on learning. They are especially focused on being made new by the grace of God, not only on receiving new ideas about God. These groups consist of people who want to more effectively practice their faith.

A class meeting is a small group that is primarily focused on transformation and not information, where people learn how to interpret their entire lives through the lens of the gospel, build a vocabulary for giving voice to their experience of God, and grow in faith in Christ.

what happened to class meetings?

Methodists became addicted to curriculum and gradually turned to information-driven small groups and away from the class meeting.

Curriculum can become addicting.

Which form of small group experience is most effective at helping people become disciples of Jesus Christ: an informational small group primarily focused on content and that asks questions of application as time allows, or a transformation focused small group that provides space for the participants to wrestle with the particularities of what is going on in their lives with Christ (like the class meeting)?

What did you do the last time you were particularly earnest in your desire to grow in your faith? Did you ask someone you perceived to be an expert to recommend a book?

But the Christian life is not primarily about knowing the right things. It is about living in Christ.

many Christians know far more than they practice. Christian discipleship, then, is more like an apprenticeship to Jesus Christ than it is about mastering a body of knowledge.

Jesus came so that we could have abundant life, not merely so that we could have the right ideas about who he is.

Christian doctrine is in informing the Christian life, it was never intended to be an end in itself. Doctrine provides boundaries and direction that can help one discern what they ought to do and what they should not do. It provides necessary guidelines for living the Christian life, but one still has to actually begin living such a life!

In class meetings, however, participants actively discuss the state of their current relationship with God and how they are living out (and sometimes failing to live out) their faith.

For people who feel a bit uncomfortable talking about their relationships with God, a study can be less intimidating because they can talk about the content instead of really talking about their relationship with God.

Sunday school does not make saints, because (pardon the cliché) it is primarily focused on helping people talk the talk, but not walk the walk.

In this example, talking generally about the difference between various kinds of small groups is most representative of an informational approach to small groups. Talking about how God has worked in your life through a particular small group experience, on the other hand, is most representative of a transformational approach to small groups.

Let me put this more boldly: information-driven small groups that do not lead to a changed life are no more valuable for Christian discipleship than a weather report that does not impact the clothes you wear.

Kitchen Groups (this is what we call our class meeting–like groups at Munger) don’t follow any particular curriculum.

Ultimately, we cannot stand still or tread water in the Christian life. We are either moving closer toward God and learning to better love our neighbor, or we are missing opportunities to further express our love for God and neighbor and gradually moving away from God. The goal of every Christian should be to become a disciple, a follower, of Jesus Christ. People do not learn how to follow Jesus by reading books about following Jesus. We learn how to follow Jesus by following him, even if by fits and starts.

not all small groups are created equal.

Never omit meeting your Class or Band … These are the very sinews of our Society; and whatever weakens, or tends to weaken, our regard for these, or our exactness in attending them, strikes at the very root of our community. —John Wesley1

Many of their contemporaries were more scandalized by the fact that they were preaching outdoors than by the content of their preaching.

Jesus preached outdoors—how dangerous can our worship of facilities and traditions become.

One way of explaining Wesley’s endurance as a key figure for contemporary Christians is his emphasis on small group formation,

“Establish class-meetings and form societies wherever you preach and have attentive hearers; for, wherever we have preached without doing so, the word has been like seed by the way-side.”

My brother Wesley acted wisely; the souls that were awakened under his ministry he joined in class, and thus preserved the fruits of his labor. This I neglected, and my people are a rope of sand.”3

In 1776, Methodists accounted for 2.5 percent of religious adherents in the colonies, the second smallest of the major denominations of that time. By 1850, Methodists comprised 34.2 percent of religious adherents in the United States, which was 14 percent more than the next largest group!4

throughout the period of this growth, every Methodist was expected to participate in a weekly class meeting.

A strong case can be made that the class meeting was the single most important factor to the growth of early Methodism and to the retention of converts within Methodism.

People who had come to faith in Christ were immediately placed in a class meeting, where they would be helped to grow in their faith and where they...

The class meeting, then, quickly developed into much more than a capital campaign. It became a crucial tool for enabling Methodists to “watch over one another in love,” to support and encourage one another in their lives with God.

To be a Methodist meant that you were involved in a weekly class meeting.

Classes were intended to have between seven and twelve members in them.

Women and men often, though not always, met together in the same class. The groups were also led by both women and men. Classes were divided primarily by geographical location. In other words, you would have attended...

(Methodist historian Scott Kisker has recently rephrased this question as “How is your life with God?”)9 Did you notice what did not happen in the early Methodist class meeting? These groups were not Bible studies. People did not study a book in these meetings. Among the purposes or goals of the class meeting, Wesley did not list the transfer of information from a perceived expert to a largely passive and ignorant audience. In other words, the class meeting was a very different kind of small group than the typical Sunday school class. Rather than being focused on transferring information or ideas about Christianity, the early Methodist class meeting was focused on helping people come to know Jesus Christ and learn how to give every part of their lives to loving and serving Christ. The phrase that best captures what the Methodists believed was so important about the class meeting was “watching over one another in love.”

People often experienced conversion simply through participating in a class meeting!10

“Never omit meeting your Class or Band; never absent yourself from any public meeting. These are the very sinews of our Society; and whatever weakens, or tends to weaken, our regard for these, or our exactness in attending them, strikes at the very root of our community.”

the class meeting was the primary structure in early Methodism that was designed to keep every person connected to the rest of the movement, to make sure that people were doing all that they could to cooperate with the grace that God had given them and to ensure that no one was forgotten or left behind.

When Methodism became a formal denomination in 1784, the class meeting was listed as a requirement for membership.

we have rarely met with one who has been much devoted to God, and at the same time not united in close christian fellowship to some religious society or other [meaning a small group like the class meeting] …

We have no doubt, but meetings of christian brethren for the exposition of scripture-texts, may be attended with their advantages. But the most profitable exercise of any is a free inquiry into the state of the heart.

The fact that today so many Methodists are attempting to follow Christ in isolation reveals a serious disconnect from the riches of the Wesleyan heritage.

We used to have an apprenticeship model to train people for ministry: you learned by watching someone else; then you did it with your mentor’s guidance and supervision, and then you did it on your own.

Wesley believed that vital Christianity was impossible without both right thinking and right acting.

Wesley’s deep concern was with a lived faith, not only a mental assent to propositional truth.

Right doctrine, or right beliefs, was important to Wesley because it provided necessary guides and boundaries for right living.

orthodoxy (right belief) leads to orthopraxy (...

No —Jesus in the heart leads us to desire truth and then understanding truth helps us to understand how to live—but then back to Jesus because He gives us the power through the Holy Spirit to live by truth.

“I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.”2