Are you being a good steward of your small group?
I’ve written about this before in reference to how you are discipling and shepherding the group God has put under your care (1 Peter 5:2, which tells about rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah’s leadership. This whole chapter is a list of all the groups and individuals who worked on the walls and the gates. Nehemiah demonstrated his leadership by his ability to get people involved in the work. We do not know exactly how he “recruited” all these people, but we can see that he inspired them by the meaningfulness of the work. He got a wide variety of people involved: men and women, people of all ages, people who had a variety of skills and experiences. He involved priests and other religious and civic leaders. Nehemiah had a strategy: he had people working specific parts of the wall and gates, often right in front of their own homes. This was wise stewardship of their time, but it also gave them ownership of their parts of the wall.
Nehemiah had a task of building a wall, but his most important responsibility was to build up the people in the process.
If the walls of Jerusalem were that important, how much more significant is the work we do of making disciples of all nations?
Are you using the gifts and abilities and passions of the people in your small group, or are you trying to do all the work yourself?
How are you building up the people in your group, family, ministry, church, business?
