What makes a great small-group experience? What brings spiritual growth to a Bible-study group’s members?
It takes a lot more than a good Bible study—one that enables everyone to engage with the text, encourages them to think about how it applies to their lives, and prompts them to pray with and for each other in response. But it never takes less than that.
That’s why the Good Book Guides exist. They’re our way of resourcing local churches like yours with a Bible study that works for your small-group members.
Okay… but why use a Good Book Guide rather than produce your own resources within your church? After all, you know your people better than any publisher or author. And you wouldn’t outsource sermon-writing…
Well, here are three reasons you might want to let us help with your small-group materials.
It’s really hard to write a great Bible study. It requires a different set of skills to preaching. Turning a one-way, didactic sermon into an interactive, inductive Bible study is especially challenging.
If you’ve ever been in a study with too many “too-obvious” questions and even more “guess-what’s-in-my-head” questions (or, if the studies are linked to a sermon series, “repeat-what-was-said-on-Sunday” questions), you’ll know that. These kinds of study don’t foster real engagement with the text, nor real wrestling with application.
You may have someone in-house who is a gifted Bible-study writer (and maybe it’s you)—in which case, great. But if not, Good Book Guides have been carefully written and edited to work as an in-the-text, well-applied inductive study—so they might be a great answer for your small-group needs.
If you’re a pastor, you’re very busy. There is always too much to do, and a lot of it is essential and a first-order pastoral priority. Caring for the flock. Preparing sermons. Mentoring younger Christians. Encouraging your elders. Doing evangelism.
If you don’t have time to sit down and spend several hours prepping a great study, that’s understandable. Equally, if you find it hard to carve out time to check resources that come from somewhere else, that’s understandable too.
And that’s why Good Book Guides exist. They’ve been developed by Reformed evangelical, trustworthy Bible teachers. They’ve been honed by gifted editors who have taken hours and hours to ensure each study is totally biblical and genuinely useful. We have the time to do that—let us use it to serve you!
If you have gifted Bible teachers among your small-group leaders, we hope they don’t use the Good Book Guides as anything more than a guide. They know their group and they’re the best people to guide them through a passage.
But if you have new or under-confident leaders among your small-group leaders (as most churches do), we designed the Good Book Guides to give them everything they need. The Leader’s Guide is there to help. Where extra questions might come up, we’ve sought to address them. Where prayer prompts might be helpful, they’re right there.
So using Good Book Guides makes leading a group a far easier thing to say “yes” to. But not only that, as a leader gains confidence using a Good Book Guide, we hope that they’ll start adapting some questions, making them better for their particular context. We hope they’ll refocus some application, making it more specific for their group. We hope the week will come when they think “I’m going to write my own study”—and that’s wonderful. The Good Book Guides are here to make it easy to start leading, and possible to learn on the job.
You might be thinking that this blog is a bit of an advertorial. You’d be right. But the reason the Good Book Guides exist at all is because we’re passionate about equipping pastors and small-group leaders with an easy-to-choose, easy-to-use, faithful and applied Bible studies.
So, they might not be the best fit for you and your church. They might not be the answer for your small groups’ needs. But… they might be. And if they are, we’d love to help you make sure your small groups are thriving and growing—without taking hours of your time each week!
Ready to equip your small groups with faithful and engaging studies? Discover the Good Book Guides.
All of us here at The Good Book Company are passionate about the Lord Jesus, his word, his church and his gospel of grace. Motivated by this passion and our involvement in local churches, it is our privilege to create and select biblical, relevant and accessible resources that will encourage you and your church family to keep going, keep growing and keep sharing your faith.
