Implementing CIC at your church
Connections in Christ (CiC) is a non-denominational, repeating church program that combines food, worship, and fun, into one main event. It is designed to be implementable at minimal cost while bringing great spiritual wealth to those who attend.
The design of CiC is loosely based on the Christ-centered recovery program Celebrate Recovery (CR). Although it emulates CR in many ways, there are distinct differences, and CIC is designed to appeal to a somewhat different audience.
Frequency
A CiC event repeats every so often. Once a week would probably be best for most churches. Monthly would be ok, but does a lonely person want to wait 25 days to connect to others? If you think that some other time interval than weekly would work best for you group, go right ahead.
Weekly Event
A standard CiC recurring event should go like: 1. A time of fellowshipping while eating (a meal time) (30-60 minutes) 2. A short worship time (15-25 minutes) 3. A short game time (15-30 minutes) If you think that including different activities would work better for your church, thats fine. Feel free to email us at info@connectionsinchrist.org to run your idea by us. CiC is disigned not to be a huge time burden to people. That is why the entire schedule is so short, including the short worship time. We assume that if someone wants a longer time of worship and teaching they can come back for a normal service at your church. CiC is designed to provide spiritual guidance to the participants, but not be overbearing doing this in terms of time. The main goal is to connect Christians to each other. The best time for a CiC will likely be a night of Monday - Friday, with the event starting at 6pm or later.
Food
Starting a CiC event with food is not a requirement, but highly recommended. Everyone likes food. Food is just a nice feature to have at any fellowship event. The time for eating should last between 30-60 minutes, depending on what you find works for your group. However, please make a decision on how the period of eating lasts, so you have consistency, and your CiC is accurately represented on our website. Providing food to people on a weekly basis may be a new experience for your church. You may need to "institutionalize" CiC in order to make a workable in your church. For example, you may need to allocate part of your church budget in order to CiC, especially for food. Here are three examples of where food could come from: 1. You could buy food once a week, such as pizzas 2. CiC leaders/atendees may be ok making food 3. If your church has a weekly meal, you may be able to use leftover from it, or have those making the church meal make extra for CiC. You could use a combination of these or alternate between these week by week.
Worship
Following food should be a short worship service. The style and order of the service can very, but here is a example: 1. A short welcome 2. A short introductory prayer 3. Some worship. This should last less than 15 minutes total 4. A short lesson (maybe a sermon). This needs to be less than 10 minutes, maybe less than 5 minutes. A regular church service is the day for long lessons and sermons, so make this very short. Just a quick bit of teaching. 5. A final prayer The entire service needs to take less than 25 minutes. Remember this saying about speeches given at graduations: "There is no bad 10 minute speech and no good 30 minutes speech."
Group Activity
Following the service is a group activity. The groups could be random or broken into some system, like by age or perhaps gender. There is some latitude on what this could be. It could be an icebreaker game, a game to help you get to know other people better. You can search the internet to gather an arsenal of games, and you can use mutiple games over and over again. The game needs to take no more than 30 minutes. However, there are some restrictions: 1. It should not be a game that does not glorify God. For example, don't use Spin the Bottle, Truth or Dare, or anything worse than this as your game. 2. It should not make some people feel uncomfortable. 3. It should be careful to not make people feel on the outset. So, if you decide to play basketball as your game, it will be hard those not in good shape to join in. Tend away from athletic games, toward ones that involve talking. 4. Teamwork may be a good to make connections. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling wrote: “There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.” Teaming up for some exciting game may help the players build connections. The players were lonely before, but now they have a memorable experience with their new friends trying to work together in a game. Examples: 1. Play a game where everyone goes around in a circle and says their name, something they like, something they don't like, and something funny about them. 2. Trivia: split into teams, and have trivia questions for each team to work together to answer. 3. Split into several teams, and upon "Go", each team sends a member up, one at a time, to use a spoon fling pennies into a bucket. Note: You can extend the game if it take too little time.
Safety
CiC always needs to be a safe event to attend. If someone says or does something that is unsafe, they need to be removed from the event. Be aware of local phone numbers to call the police, fire department, etc, and know that you may need to call them or 911 if an unsafe situation arises.
Greetings
At the CR 2022 training event, one of the panelists mentioned that some people who were interested in CR but had never been to one would drive to a local CR, but were afraid to go in. We need to understand that the idea of going to an event that infers "weakness" to a person, may dissuade people from coming. This is so sad because people need events like CiC and CR! What better way to go against loneliess than to give someone a greeting?! So, at the very least, if it is appropriate in your case, you should have parking lot greeters who stand at the edge of the parking lot and welcome people to CiC. They may be able to answer questions like "Am I in the right place?" and "Where are they having the meal?". The greeters may be located at the entrance door for CiC, but a better place would be a where the parking lot leads up to the church, if this isn't itself next to the door. That way, people in their cars can see them clearly, and may be encouraged to get out and engage. The greeter should not stare around at people in the parking lot, making them feel bad and alienating them from people further then they already are. And whether or not you have a greeter may depending on the day - you don't need to stand in a storm to greet people.
Outreach
Outreach is undoutably an important component of helping lonely people become aware that CiC exists. There are almost no restrictions on the ways you can outreach about CiC. The only rules are: 1. Be aware of the privacy of the atendees at CiC. 2. Don't outreach in a way that would bring shame on the name of God. Outreaching at local events is excellent. Telling people at a recovery clinic about CiC, if allowable under their rules, is perfectly acceptable. Also, outreach on social media is very powerful, since it can travel places people cannot and travel into a lonely person's residence when real people cannot.
If you would like to start a CiC at your church, great! To do that, email us at info@connectionsinchrist.org detailing:
1. What church you are?
2. Where you are located? (though we can probably figure this out from question 1)
3. What day and time do you run?
a. What day?
b. What time does the food, worship, and game parts begin?
c. This is so that we can accurately display your information on our website
Once we approve of your CiC, we will put it on the map on the website.
Note: CiC is not an "actual organization" in that is just a framework for a standardized program to address loneliness. There is not an actual Connections in Christ organization at this time.
The creators of this content and website are in no way responsible for anything that happens at a CiC event. Use CiC at your own risk.