The Gospel-Centered Community: Study Guide with Leader’s Notes is by Robert H. Thune and Will Walker, published by New Growth Press. This page previously credited Thune alone; the two have written together for years.
Thune is founding and lead pastor of Coram Deo Church in Omaha. Walker is lead pastor of Providence Church in Austin.
Know what you are buying
Two things worth being clear about.
First, this is a study guide, nine lessons for a small group, not a book to read on your own. There is no argument developed across chapters. Read alone in an armchair it will feel thin, because most of its content is supposed to happen in a room with other people.
Second, it is the companion volume to The Gospel-Centered Life by the same authors. You can run it standalone, but it assumes the framework that earlier study builds, and a group that has done The Gospel-Centered Life first will get considerably more out of it.
What it teaches
The premise is that Christian community is not built by better programming or by getting the right people in the room. It is the work of the Spirit shaping a group of people who did not choose each other into something that looks like Christ.
The practical consequence, and the reason the study is worth doing, is that it goes after the specific ways groups fail: the performing, the managed answers, the unspoken agreement not to say anything that would require someone to respond. It presses on those rather than on abstractions about fellowship.
The leader’s notes are the strongest feature and the reason to buy this edition rather than the participant’s guide. They give background on each lesson and discussion questions that go somewhere, which matters enormously when the man leading has never led a group before and is one week ahead of everyone else.
What we removed from this page
A line attributed to Thune and a quotation from an unnamed reader praising the leader guide. Neither could be verified.
We also removed the framing of this as a men’s resource. It is a general small-group study, written for mixed groups in a local church. A men’s group can absolutely use it, but it was not written for one.
Limits
Nine lessons is short for the subject, and the study moves faster than some of its material deserves. Groups that go deep will want to spend two weeks on several of the lessons.
It is also written from inside a particular stream, the Reformed, gospel-centred renewal of the last two decades, and it uses that vocabulary without much explanation. A group unfamiliar with the language will need the leader to translate.
Who it is for
A small group that has been meeting long enough to be comfortable and is starting to suspect comfortable is the problem. Get the leader’s notes edition, take it slowly, and expect the middle lessons to be the hard ones.
The Gospel-Centered Community on Amazon (study guide with leader’s notes)