Leonard: When does your group meet?
Ever since I was 23, my career has changed very little: I’m in the business of relationships, people and faith. It has consisted of speaking/teaching in front of various sized audiences (25-400), getting to meet in smaller groups of 5-14 (ish), and lots of one-on-one conversations over lunch or coffee for mentoring and counseling. They all have their place in our lives and there are so many benefits to each of them.
Over the past six years, my career has shifted a bit and now most of my time is spent in the smaller group space. Five mornings per week you can find me with 10-14 men sitting around a table from 7:30-8:30. As the years have gone by and word of mouth has gone out I began to see how powerful small groups can be in one’s life, so much so that men began leaving the groups they had been in for two to three years to start a similar group with a new set of 10-14 of their friends. Then their wives started asking, “Do you have women’s groups?” We didn’t … but now we do.
As I write this column, we have about 140 people on any given week sitting around a boardroom or conference room table in Eagle and Edwards “doing life together.” While the ages around the table vary from 83 (shout out to Ben) to 27, it has been so fun to hear the discussions around parenting, marriage, divorce, cancer, faith, business, and the pros and cons of living in the valley (the cost of living, 8 inches of snow in April, or fly-fishing on the side of the road for 30 minutes on the drive home, etc.) to name a few. So much laughter is had, wisdom shared, and life discussed.
The time with old and new friends is so powerful that guys have begun asking to Zoom in while on vacation (this morning we had one guy in Florida and another in California rotate their mornings around not missing their group). It’s powerful.
As much as I love it all, what I look forward to the most are the discussions that are faith-centric. I’ve had dozens of people say, “I have so many questions!” While I don’t begin to claim that I have all the answers, I have spent the past 25 years studying the scriptures, asking many of the questions I get asked now, and trying to make sense of all that Jesus taught and how he lived his life.
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Someone who has almost no religious background recently told me, “I have been such a skeptic my whole life and love getting to ask the questions I’ve had for decades, especially in a small group of friends where we’re all trying to figure some pretty important things out.” I smiled.
When does your group meet? If I could put you into a group, would you be interested in investing 60 minutes per week to build some more community and pursue faith? What I’ve found is that most people in the valley truly want to deepen their faith but they either have something else planned for Sunday mornings or don’t want to have anything to do with “organized religion.”
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I get that and that is partly why Ascend is seeing so much growth. We are a different model for spiritual growth (weekday mornings/smaller groups/ discussions not lectures). We just finished putting a video together that tells the story of what Ascend Vail is all about and I’d love for you to check it out to see if it’s something you’d be interested in.
The six minutes will let you see with your own eyes what we’re doing and you’ll probably even see a few of your friends in it … “it’s a small world (valley) after all.” Go to AscendVail.com to watch it. If your curiosity is piqued, shoot me an email. If you want to ask me a question that is faith-related, do that. I’d love to hear from you.
Scott Leonard is the president of Ascend Vail. You can reach him at ascendvail@gmail.com
