I’ve written before about the importance of discipleship and the ease with which you can start a small discipleship group. (No, really! It’s easy! Do it!) Today Sherry Weddell writes:
Life After Sunday is a beautifully written, very inexpensive, highly flexible adult small group process that fosters encounter and discipleship and is downloaded directly off Lumen’s website. Inspired by Communion and Liberation. I know the authors!
Take a look. There are 26 different topic modules which can be gone through at various speeds and mixed and matched for the interests of your group. Looking for a 6 week mystagogia small group experience to support your new Catholics? A Lenten Mom’s group? Done! If you download, they only ask for a $25 donation! This could be a great resource for your parish small groups!
. . . This material is thoroughly orthodox and trustworthy.
Sounds like what you need. Check it out.
Artwork: Christ. Sketch for the painting Christ and the Sinner (Who is without sin?) from the collection of the Russian Museum. Vasily Polenov [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Meanwhile I pose the potluck conundrum: At what point can one be excused from bringing food to the group potluck on the grounds of comparative incompetence?
Let’s imagine, hypothetically speaking, that someone you know belongs to a large group that holds lots of potluck suppers. Furthermore, the food is always extraordinarily good, and there is always more than anyone can eat. So much so that the one time your hypothetical friend actually remembered to bring something, it was still in the kitchen at the end of the night, because there was other much better food wisely offered first.
Let us imagine, for the sake of this exercise, that the person was short on time and her children who usually bake the brownies for the potluck (which they are happy to bring home afterwards, but this is not necessarily for the good of your hypothetical friend, who has difficulty not eating brownies, but is evincing evidence of having already stockpiled a few about her person) . . . anyway, we’re imaging that the person is now resorting purchasing cookies from Aldi to throw on a paper plate and bring to the potluck. Admittedly, she is planning to get the very good peanut butter cookies, which she will be pretty happy to bring home afterwards, so it’s okay if no one eats them.
Does there ever reach a point when everyone should just admit this hypothetical person should not bother bringing her paltry contributions? Or does this exercise in humility cancel all the time in purgatory she’s going to get for either (a) eating the odd number* of cookies she brings home or (b) yelling at her kids to quit fighting over the odd number of cookies?
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Rest assured, of course, that if such a hypothetical situation did exist, the person involved would definitely try to keep up the token contributions, and also such a person does know how to pick out the good store-bought cookies, so it’s not as bad as all that.
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Meanwhile, get yourself a small group.
*We might imagine, for example, that this hypothetical person needed the cookies to come home in exactly multiples of four. But since this is just an academic exercise, you could imagine a different number of children committing horrible sins in the effort to secure the unparceled goods.
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