Customer Reviews for Zondervan Youth Specialties The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
Zondervan Youth Specialties The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
Description: Community is a fundamental life search. We need to belong. In our time, we search with some increasing desperation as terms like neighbor, family, and congregation are being redefined. The Search to Belong, is a practical guide for those struggling to build a community of believers in a culture that wants to experience belonging over believing
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Customer Reviews for The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
Review 1 for The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
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Date:September 15, 2008
Jenni
There is so much truth in this book. Unlike the other reviewer I have repeatedly been told that the purpose of small groups is to provide community with maybe some learning thrown in. I'm on this site buying a copy for a friend who's been told the sole purpose of small groups is friendship. It's a common mistake.This is a book that says it's about small groups but is really about community and about all relationships and therefore relevant to most of life, individually and as a church.This is one of my life changing books. I hope everyone in church leadership reads it.
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Review 2 for The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
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Date:January 6, 2007
SRB
This book has some good insights, but also some major flaws. The insight I found most helpful is that people experience the sense of belonging in different ways for different contexts - i.e. we connect differently in casual social relationships than we do in close personal relationships - and that churches need to foster connections across the whole spectrum of contexts. The biggest flaw of the book is that the author presents his ideas as a critique of the small group movement, but defines the purpose of small groups so narrowly that his arguments take on the character of beating up on a straw man. His critique of small groups is based on the idea that their sole purpose is to provide church members with a sense of belonging to the community. If that's why a church is doing small groups, his critique is valid. But that's such an anemic view of small group ministry that I find it hard to believe that most churches are approaching it that way. My view of small groups includes the ideas that they are also contexts for helping people discover and use their spiritual gifts, for identifying and training leaders for the church, for providing mutual accountability and support, etc., and thus found the author's criticisms to be largely irrelevant to my own situation.
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