Whimsical September

A Family + Lifestyle Blog

Military Life 1 Comment

The Gift of a Women’s Fellowship Group + Tips for Starting Your Own

Women's Fellowship Group

Hi there! My name is Kourtney and I blog over at The Martins and the Marines! An avid Whimsical September reader myself, I am super excited to be here blogging today!

 

To start, a little about me. I was born and raised in good old Kansas (the first thing that drew me to Erica’s blog!) A few moves later, I married my high school sweetheart (who I met in boarding school in New Hampshire, crazy!) and have been following him around the country on this military adventure ever since he joined the Marine Corps! For the time being, we’re here at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. I am a full time working momma, part time college teacher, and part time bible student.

 

We currently have two little red-headed toddlers (one and three), but God-willing, we are prayerfully excited to grow our family in the (hopefully) near future! We also have two German Shepherds who are our first babies, which makes for a pretty entertaining and hectic house most of the time. But that’s how we love it… as you’ll read in this post! In my free time, I love photography, Netflix, and our kids’ bedtime!
 

I’m here today to talk about a Christian women’s fellowship group that I’ve been overwhelmingly blessed by over the past year!

 

I’ve grown to love our Tuesday nights together so much. One year ago, I connected with a few girls in our neighborhood seeking to make friends, specifically looking for sisters in Christ who desired to form a fellowship in our base housing community. This fellowship has allowed us to build friendships, find support, and strengthen each other’s daily walk with God. All of us are military wives. All of us are mothers. We all live in base housing. We get this crazy military lifestyle. Long story short, with my crazy work schedule, none of the bible studies through our church were possible. They all seemed to be during the day, which would be ideal if I was a stay-at-home mom, but alas I’m not. Maybe someday, but a lot of prayer and talking has us feeling like I’m in the right place, for now.

 

One afternoon during a nice long walk our dogs through our neighborhood, I started thinking. These walks seem to be where I do my best thinking. There are a lot of homes in our neighborhood, and I couldn’t possibly be the only one yearning to find sisters in Christ in this military community. Coupled with the fact that people move in and out of our neighborhood at a cyclic rate (after all, it is base housing), I was feeling like I knew far too few neighbors. And it was there and then, as I pushed my double stroller with a German Shepherd on each side, that God placed it on my heart to start this group.

 

I had no idea how I was going to do it. I didn’t know anyone, I’d never led a bible study or life group, and I’d be trying to invite a bunch of strangers over to my house with the hope it wouldn’t be awkward. In the interest of full disclosure, it was a little awkward until we got in our groove and got to know each other.
So after some planning, thought, and conversations with friends, I reached out via social media and here we are a year later, minus about 2/3 of our kids!

Looking back, I realize I should have done this so much earlier. God gave me all the resources to start this group, and now it seems like it took me forever to hear His word. We moved into a neighborhood without any kind of Christian women’s group. We have a huge kitchen table that seats eight comfortably, but we’ve definitely had 13 of us sitting around it on occasion. We have a playroom that is perfect for the kids and a backyard to send them off to play if it gets too crazy. We are incredibly blessed, but all of it is truly God’s. These are His gifts, so Tuesday nights we open our doors to women in our community to come hang out, talk, pray, laugh, cry, or simply listen.

 

It’s been such a blessing for all of these women to come into my life and I’ve learned so much from so many of them. I spent all of Steve’s deployment looking forward to Tuesday nights because I knew the house would be loud and crazy and get messy with the company of all these families. It’s such a blessing that we are able to spend every Tuesday in each other’s company and have formed these friendships in the process!

 

If you are at all considering joining a Christian women’s group, I urge you to do it. If you’re thinking about starting one, why not?! A year later, I stand here humbled and so excited for what the future holds! My heart was sings with joy seeing all of these kids being raised under the guidance of our Savior swinging away together on the play set in the backyard!
 
Here are a few of the things that I’ve learned over the past year, if you’re thinking about starting, leading, or even joining a women’s fellowship!
 
1. Pray. This was my first step to starting this group, and is the one thing that hasn’t changed since we started. When we’re not exactly sure where God is leading this group, we pray. We collect prayer requests and pray together every week, and pray for each other throughout the week. I don’t take for granted knowing that every single week, these families are literally praying for my family and our personal struggles, our successes, and everything in between. What a humbling feeling. 
 
2. Social media is your friend. This whole group started with social media, after all. When I had exactly zero people in mind to join, I posted on our local neighborhood page and all of the sudden, we had a lot of interest! It took awhile to get our groove. A whole lot of people responded that were looking for something a little different, something came up, they moved, etc. But this is how we found our core group! Now, we have a private Facebook page where we post book information, coordinate meetings (snacks!), send out mid-week prayer requests, and share links or pictures with the group. 
 
3. Find a group you can relate to. We’re all military spouses, so that in itself gives us more than enough to talk about. Mothering with the stress of deployments, training, moving, no local family support, and all the temptations of the world isn’t easy. Especially since all of us started this journey at such a young age! (We were 21 when we got married, and while I wouldn’t change it for the world, it’s not easy!). Our particular group doesn’t all attend the same church, but we do hold the same foundational beliefs. 
 
4. Stay consistent and organized. Same time, same place each week. There’s no confusion about where and when we’re meeting, and by now everyone knows to just walk in my front door and say hello! For the sake of the volume level, people try to leave their kids with their hubbies if they can. But knowing this is the military and husbands aren’t always around, we usually have at least four little ones running around or watching cartoons… which makes my little ones’ day! 
 
5. Pick a book. Trial and error. When we started, we kicked it off with a lesson plan. Y’all, I don’t have nearly enough time to whip up a sermon every week. That’s why we go to church. We’ve found the most success when we have a book to read together, and discuss a chapter or two each week! Some of my favorite books we’ve read are Desperate, Creative Counterpart, and currently, The Best Yes. 
 
6. Keep it safe. We talk about our struggles, our husbands, and families in this group. Each time we start a new book, we add people, and we press reset and make sure it is a safe zone. We are all comfortable to know that what we say isn’t going to turn into gossip. And on the subject of gossip, we all know when you get together with a bunch of women, there is a real temptation for the conversation to turn negative. We aren’t there to complain about our husbands! We’re there to build up each others marriages and give encouragement. There’s a big different between sharing struggles and pointless griping, am I right?
My last piece of advice is to have fun and be yourself! These women have become my closest friends here at our military base. We aren’t better than anyone else in our neighborhood because we are Christians. I AM SO FAR FROM PERFECT!!! Our goal is to actively seek God in our lives, and share this with all of the neighbors we can! Our doors are open on Tuesday nights and we pray for all to come. Believers, seekers, non-believers, whoever! Having PCS’d twice already, I can honestly say that this group is a big part of the reason that we love where we are in this military adventure. 
 
Come chaos, come mess, come noise, come Jesus! The playroom will pick up, the dishes will wash, but the relationship with our Savior is what we seek. 

Most recently, my next step to building this group is seeking personal development in the form of a graduate program in Christian ministry! Back to college I go! I’ll be writing about this on my blog this week if you’re interested in checking it out! 

If Erica has any Kansas City area readers, I highly recommend Westside Family Church! This is the church I grew up in, until we were married and we found our own church here at Camp Lejeune.

 

Side note – I love this post Erica wrote awhile ago about how finding a church home after a military move is so hard!

 

Last, but not least, a huge thank you to Erica for letting me take over one of my very favorite blogs for the day!

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