One of the best things that you can do for your MSC is to plan a semester out.
This not only frees up your MSC lead team to allow your bi-weekly lead team meals to actually be “discipleship meals” instead of “planning meetings,” but it also allows you to strategize as to the overall direction of your MSC. This way, you can take a longer term perspective and not be constantly stressed with thinking and planning for your next gathering.
Here are the steps to planning a successful semester for your MSC:
- Once a semester, organize a 2-3 hour block of time for your MSC lead team to come together and plan out the focus of all the gatherings for the next 3-4 months.
- Make sure that your MSC gatherings have some sort of rhythm. For example, since my MSC has a young families focus, our rotation looks like this: mission focus, marriage focus, mission focus, parent focus, mission focus, marriage focus, etc. We also do an occasional fun gathering once every 6-8 weeks (see the attached files for an idea of this).
- Once you brainstorm and plan out what the focus of all your gatherings are, assign a point leader for each of the gatherings. This person doesn’t have to do all the work and necessarily teach that gathering, but they are the representative on your lead team who will make sure everything will happen for that day. So they are the master coordinator of that gathering.
- Share the plan with your MSC using some sort of template like the one below.
Tools to Use:
- My MSC Lead Team uses google docs as a place to write out the semester schedule and to ensure that everyone knows who owns which weeks
- Calendar and Groups Template (PDF Version)
- Calendar and Groups Template (Pages Version)
- Calendar and Groups Template (Microsoft Word Version)
As you’ll see on the “Calendar and Groups Template,” I also wrote out all the different open small groups that are happening in the off weeks of my regular MSC gathering. This is to help the people in my MSC realize all the different options of small groups they can join for deeper study and community. If you don’t have small groups formed yet, or don’t have as many as I do, then please use that space as a way to envision people to form smaller groups.
