Experiencing Experiencing God

Who Am I?

I am a pastor of a small church in the upper midwest USA. We have a group of ladies that went through the Experiencing God materials this past summer and asked me to teach it at our Wednesday Night Prayer/Bible Study Meetings.

Thus, I am facilitating a group of about sixteen people going through the book Experiencing God. This is my first time through this material. There are several in the group who have already been through the materials.

The rest of this particular BLOG post can be skipped if you are not interested in facilitating an Experiencing God group.

Early facilitating notes

I am writing these notes a couple of days after our very first Experiencing God class. All in all, it was a great start. For me it is hard to do materials that are not my own invention. But these materials are pretty well put together.

This would be very tough without using the Experiencing God Adult Leader's Guide. I wish I had taken more time to review the Adult Leader's Guide before starting this. I recommend taking about 8 hours to go through the Leader's Guide before the first class if you are new at this material (like me). If you have taken the course but not facilitated you probably could get ready in six hours. If you have taught it before, probably four hours would do. The Leader's Guide is definitely worth the extra $12 (amazon price).

There is a lot of photocopying in the first week. Copy extra. I had to send a student out to copy five more pages - I chose someone who had already facilitated in the past.

I wish we had purchaged new, blank journals before assigning the first week's unit so that I could have passed them out sooner.

For journaling, I like Composition Books. They are cheap ($1 at my local dollar store). They have wide rule so that there is plenty of room in them. In my opinion, the best ones are quad grided page Composition Books but they are pricier. They are a lot cheaper than the nicer bound journals you buy at a bookstore. They also hold together well.

Personally, I really like the smaller 4.5 x 3.25 version of these. Each page is much smaller but always seems to be enough for what I want to write down. If you buy the little ones don't buy the ones that are glued down the binding as they come apart. Buy the ones that look like paper folded - they are sown and the pages don't fall out of them. You can stiffen the backbone with packaging tape if you need to.

When it comes to journaling, the old motto is true: Your Mileage May Vary.

There are some places where the book could use improvement.

When I did Unit 1, Day 1, it asked for the memory verse. It was at the beginning of unit 1 before the day 1. It would have been helpful the first time through to remind where the memory verse was found (at least for this first lesson). I made the assumption that there was a memory verse for each day but it seems like there is one for each week/unit.

We only have one hour and this material does not easily break down into one hour sections. They have a suggestion in the leader's guide how to do that, but it did not seem obvious as I went through the Leader's Guide.

The video tapes are not cheap, they are about $140 for the class. I have to think that they are probably worth it but expensive for our small church to buy. I guess we will "wing it".

With our group size the book recommends breaking up into two separate classes. That's logistically tough for us since we meet before choir and that is a part of why many of the people turn out. We will see how this works out when the sharing starts.

That's about it for the administrative stuff. I'll post some reflections on the materials later.