CONVERSATION STARTERS
Conversation Starters help us dig deeper, connecting Sunday’s sermons with our Monday lives. These prompts have been designed to help Community Groups grow in their relationship with God, with one another, and with their neighbors. Please know that these questions are meant to be a resource to you. You do not have to follow them verbatim or get through them all. We trust you to know your group and to ask the questions based on your group needs.

1. Read John 4:1-42. To really experience this scene, have one person read the narrator part, and three others read the parts of Jesus, the Samaritan woman and the disciples.

2. We learn that Jews “have no dealings with Samaritans” in verse 9. Who do you have no dealings with? What makes these people feel so different that it seems relating just wouldn’t work?

3. How did Jesus interact with the marginalized here or in other stories throughout the gospels? (Share examples.)

4. Discuss the disciples' role in this scene - what did they get right? What did they miss?

5. Who is one person you encounter regularly that you could initiate conversation with in simple ways, rather than avoiding them or focusing attention on your phone?

PRAYER PROMPT
Pray that God would help us to see opportunities to engage with people we cross paths with, remembering that evangelism begins with knowing people and listening to their stories. Ask Him for eyes to see what keeps us isolated, occupied or distracted from connecting with those around us.

Title: The Samaritan Woman at the Well
Reference: John 4:1-42
Speaker: Bill Gorman, BillG@cckc.church

> Jesus wants our shame (not our scrambling)

Scrambling is when someone is “...scurrying about trying desperately to handle themselves, each other, God, and the world. There is absolutely no ‘rest’ here.”
—Richard Averbeck, “Biblical Theology for Counseling”

> Jesus wants our worship (not our ideology)

> Jesus wants everyone (even them)

"The great tragedy is today is not so much that our society is still divided along racial, cultural, and class lines, but that God's people, the church, are even more deeply divided… Oneness, in a nation structured by the confines of racial autonomy, necessitates that our knowledge of and love for one another must be intentional in nature, just as Jesus was the woman at the well… Just as it was in Samaria, oneness across racial lines is the greatest evangelistic teaser to the presentation the gospel that we could ever broadcast both locally and abroad.”
— Tony Evans, Oneness Embraced: Reconciliation, the Kingdom, and How we are Stronger Together