Page 2 of 4

1. Include a short explanation of the purpose of this accountability group.
2. Make clear that this requires a commitment to come to regular meetings and to invest in the lives of the other members.
3. Ask the recipient of the invitation to pray about whether God wants him to join the group.
4. Ask the recipient to respond by a given date, usually about four weeks after you send out the invitations.
5. It may be helpful to include a page upon which they can write questions about the group.
6. Don't include the details about when and where the first meeting will be. You want your first meeting to be a strong start to a group of committed members. Some of those that you invite might not commit to joining the group. Only those who commit to being members of the group should be invited to the first meeting.
7. Don't mention the names of the others whom you are inviting. The recipient's decision to join should be a decision between him or her and God, not dependent on who else might be in the group. Also, if someone decides not to join the group, his decision should be respected and remain confidential. The others who are invited don't need to know about it.

Preparing

Once you have everyone's final response, you can officially start the group. Even if only one person out of those you invited is interested in starting a group with you, start the group.

Set a time and place for your meetings with the other members. The place needs to be private, somewhere where everyone in the group feels safe from intrusion. The length of your meetings will depend on what fits in everyone's schedules and on the size of your group. I recommend you take the number of people in your group and multiply by five to get the number of minutes for an ideal meeting. Using this method, an ideal meeting for six people is 30 minutes. (This is only true if everyone is always on time, and it doesn't allow for extra chatting after the meeting. You might want to multiply by seven instead to allow for conversation.) I strongly recommend having weekly meetings. It will be difficult to maintain effective accountability if you meet less frequently. Once you have these logistics figured out, you need to prepare for the first meeting.

Content

There are two crucial parts to an effective accountability group meeting. The first is a time in which each member shares how he has sinned and the temptations he has faced since the last meeting, and how he fared concerning the temptations he mentioned at the previous meeting. You can facilitate this sharing in several ways. One is for the leader of the week to ask the following four questions of each member at every meeting:

1. What sins have you committed since our last meeting?
2. What temptations did you face?
3. How were you delivered from those temptations?
4. Are you unsure if any of your actions, thoughts, or words since our last meeting were sinful or not? If so, which ones?

You could also just ask questions 1 and 2. Another way is to go over at the first meeting what each member will share each week and skip actually asking them the questions each week.

Someone may confess a sin of which they appear to be ashamed. If you observe this to be the case, ask him if he has been able to receive the Lord's forgiveness for his sin. If he says he still doesn't feel forgiven, lay a hand on him (ask permission first) and say, "You are forgiven in the name of Christ." It is important to affirm that we have been forgiven for our sins when we repent of them. You may be tempted to respond, "That's okay" but this is neither true nor helpful. "You have been forgiven through Christ" is the truthful response to a confession of sin.