Getting to know people around the fire pit.

So you’ve read all three books this summer for the Build Your Community Challenge and now you’re inviting people over to your fire pit to get to know them better! Congratulations! You’ve made it!

But what are you going to do now that they’re coming over?

It’s time to start figuring out if these people are part of your community that you’ll be able to actually count on. This is when you need to start working on actually knowing these people at a deeper level.

Small talk has become the norm, so it’s time to flip the script and start working on deep talk!

And we get there by first having some fun together so we all relax and then can actually talk!

Ice Breakers & Boxes of Questions

A quick search engine search for “Group Ice Breakers” can bring up lots of zany questions to ask that will get people laughing with the answers!

Silly games like Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza game can get groups with little kids going pretty quickly since it’s such a fun game that everyone understands!

Card games that ask deeper questions are a good next step to learn more about people. We recommend the Cultivated Conversation card game. If you are specifically looking for religious people to have in your core group, the author of “Find Your People” actually has her own card deck of questions that you can purchase and go deeper with them.

Spending Time Together

Both books about community that we read this summer focus on getting a core of five close families in your circle and having an extended community of anywhere between 50 - 150 people.

They also talk about spending 200 hours together before you can kind of feel like you know a person well. 400 hours is where the magic happens and you start to really know this person as a friend instead of a good acquaintance.

The only way to know people well is to start spending a lot of time together. There’s no other way around it.

So, I encourage you to be intentional about spending time together with these people. Go do things you all like to do together. Have fun. Drop in on each other and forgive the messy houses. Start calling each other when you need help and find out if they’ll show up for you in your time of need. Hopefully you also show up when they need help.

We need to figure out if these are our people…and the only way to do that is to open up, spend time together, and see if they are the right people for us….and if we’re the right people for them.

Humans have been living in communities since we were created.

Even though we have lost our way over the past 120 years in the US, we can bring it back. It’s in our blood. We wouldn’t have gotten here if all our ancestors hadn’t figured this out! If they could do it, then we can too.

Let’s build our better future and make our ancestors proud! You can do this!

xoxo,

The Florida Freedom Family