What Makes a Successful Team Bible Study

When I started my first worship-team Bible study and it was massively unsuccessful.

Why?

We’ll, to start with, I picked the Book of Galatians which is by far one of the hardest epistles to understand.

But I was audacious and wanted to know the Word and challenge my team, so I went for it.

Secondly, I had everyone on the team buy an inch and a half thick commentary and assigned 30-40 pages of “required reading” each week.

Let’s just say that after the first week, I was overwhelmed. I had great motives and all the passion but had the wrong idea of what would make my Bible study a success.  

“Worship Leaders: when leading your team bible study don't feel pressured to always come with an impressive Biblical insight. Simply facilitate discussion by asking questions and creating on-ramps for people to engage."

Over time I began to realize that my worship team didn’t need me to be (nor did they want to be) an expert on the book of Galatians. Also, most of them weren’t looking to me to be their primary Bible teacher. They all attended church and heard messages from their pastor at least once a week.

I realized that what was beneficial for my team was for me to provide a place to take a truth from God’s word and facilitate a discussion around that topic.

Once my job changed from preparing an impressive presentation to simply being a facilitator creating on-ramps for people to talk and share, I began to look forward to our times together. And so did my team. 

"My definition of a successful worship team bible study is when everyone opens their mouth and shares at least once. "

I’m not saying you shouldn’t prepare, study, know your stuff, or tackle a more challenging book of the Bible.

But I am saying you may need to rework your definition of a successful Bible study.

After years of leading a weekly Bible study for my team, my definition of success is to get people talking.

Get your team engaged and opening their mouth to share at least once in every Bible study. An engaged team Bible study will be a successful one for months and years to come.

But if people are disengaged, they'll soon grow weary of your Bible study time.

I'll be talking a lot more about the practicals of how to do this in the weeks to come. But for now, do you currently have a Bible study with your team? If so, how's the engagement level?

Huge thanks to my friend Jordan Vanderplate for letting me use this photo of Hilo, Hawaii. Check out more of his work here.

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