Thoughts on Small Groups 1

Note to self: create a category for small group posts when I get home from the beach

As part of the strategic planning for 2009 I've been reading Activate: An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups. It's not really an entirely new approach, more like a summary of the "lessons learned in the last ten years".

I've been reading this book and meditating on the Bhakti-vrksa manual, the BV program, and the previous analyses I've done.

Nityananda Priya das is on loan to Brisbane from Melbourne at the moment. He's up here working a contract for a number of months. Both in Melbourne and here in Brisbane he is an active and effective preacher of Krishna Consciousness among the Indian community, especially young students, who are always the most vulnerable and easily captured.

if you think that sounds cynical, you should read "The Cell Church", a 1998 book by Larry Stockstill. This book about Christian small group preaching contains one section describing how they target foreign students, inviting them to a dinner where they serve all their national dishes, chuck on a CD of their national music, then pull out a national map to pore over together after the meal.

Definitely cheesy, and bordering on manipulation. All preaching, however, and even all interactions, are arguably a form of manipulation - they are actions designed to elicit a particular response. That's another topic though.

i had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with NP prabhu. In that conversation he mentioned that young Indians who come to study in a foreign country like Australia become more appreciative of their own country and culture, to a degree they never would if at home in India. It's a case of "you don't know what you've got until it's gone".

Now, I'd always chalked up the success of BV among ex-pat Indian populations to "cultural predisposition" to Krishna Consciousness. Now, this is true. However, it's a special case of a general principle that can also be applied to Western populations.

That is, that BV groups fulfill a social and psychological need of the participants, and they do so in a Krishna Conscious way.

The homesick and newly nationally chauvinistic young student in a foreign land (I'm sorry, but New Zealand is the best damned country in the world ;-) has psychological needs that participating in a BV group fulfils. The role of temple as a hub of social life is also fulfilled, especially in Muslim countries where temple worship and congregation is forbidden, and where BV had its earliest successes.

So what this means is that BV is not impossible among populations who are not "culturally predisposed" to Krishna Consciousness, it's just a question of understanding what their psychological and social needs are, and meeting those in the context of the small group program, in a Krishna Conscious way.