The starter - the first ten minutes

This is just a simple activity to break the ice, and make people feel at home. It launches them into the content of the evening in an unthreatening, fun way.

For example: Week 1 is about "Jesus - who was he?". The starter is just a simple quiz with questions people don't normally ask about Jesus (Did he have brothers and sisters? What crime was he condemned for? How many people claim to follow him around the world today?) and they just have to guess at the answers, from three alternatives we'll offer. We might give a tiny prize to the small group that gets most answers right, but the quiz is designed not to make anybody feel stupid if they don't get it right.

Week 4 is called "Being a Christian - what's it like?" And the starter is just six little scenarios in which different people react differently to a crisis. People have to decide: "Which of them showed the most 'Christian' behaviour?" It just gets them thinking, in a fun way, about how Christians are supposed to be different from other people.

We'll probably do the "starter" all together, as one big group, and one group member (or two) can lead us through it. Then we'll do the next part - the Bible bit - in small groups.

HERE'S THE STARTER FOR WEEK 2

We'll need stacks of newspapers and lots of scissors and PrittStick. In small groups, people leaf through papers, cutting out "bad news" stories (wars, famines, robberies, whatever) and stick them on to a large sheet of paper (we'll need some of those too!)(. The aim is to produce the most horrific newspaper page ever, and the group who gets most doomful stories on their page within five minutes is the winner.

We then ask them to count up how many of their stories are bad news because of

some chance event
some natural disaster
something done wrong by a human

... and write down their totals in the space provided on their session sheet.

Usually you'll find that human-caused problems loom far, far larger than anything else. Anyway, once you have the totals, groups should discuss the two questions on their sheets:

Can you think of answers to any of the problems in the third group [the human-caused ones]?
Why are those problems so hard to deal with?

It should get people thinking about the way our own evil nature creates so many problems, and that it's virtually impossible to solve most of them unless human nature is also changed...

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