Potluck Paradigm: Becoming a Shared Table Church

What if the Church was never meant to be built around programs, professionals, or performance, but around shared life, participation, and trust in God's abundance?Potluck Paradigm: Becoming a Shared Table Church is an eight-session Growth Group series based on Potluck Paradigm: Cultivating a Convivial Church Culture. It invites congregations to reimagine church life through a simple but transformative image: the church as a potluck rather than a restaurant.In a restaurant, a few prepare and many consume. At a potluck, everyone is invited to bring what they have, receive from others, and discover abundance together.This series helps groups move from consumer church to shared-table church. Through Scripture, conversation, prayer, family practices, and weekly action steps, participants explore how God has already placed gifts, talents, relationships, resources, stories, and opportunities within the congregation and community.Across eight sessions, groups will reflect on themes such as abundance rather than scarcity, hidden gifts, belonging, hospitality, shared responsibility, facilitative leadership, everyday mission, and small faithful experiments. Each session follows a simple 4 W's format: Welcome, Worship, Word, and Witness, making it easy for lay leaders to guide meaningful discussion and practical application.Designed for churches, small groups, ministry teams, and intergenerational communities, this guide is best used alongside a copy of Potluck Paradigm: Cultivating a Convivial Church Culture. It is not a guilt-based volunteer campaign or a packaged program to implement. It is an invitation to discern together what kind of church God is forming: a community where no one is merely a spectator, no one provides everything, and everyone has something to bring.Honest, hopeful, biblical, and practical, this Growth Group series is for congregations who sense that something more is possible and who are ready to discover what happens when the Church becomes less about what it offers and more about who we become together in Christ.