258. Creating Sacred Spaces: Initiating Your Own Holy Spirit Group

Maybe you are like me, you are hungry for something more.

Like you've been learning a lot about God, gaining the knowledge, reading your Bible, doing the Bible studies, getting the best new Bible plan in the Bible app, going to church, checking all the boxes.

And somewhere in the middle of all that doing, you felt a quiet ache within you, maybe a whisper that is saying, there has to be something more than this.

I've totally been in that place, that aching, restless.

There has to be more than this place where the information is good and the sermons are solid and the quiet times are happening or not.

And yet something in your spirit kept leaning forward, kept reaching, kept saying yes.

But what about fully knowing, experiencing him, not just knowing about him, but actually knowing him.

What I didn't know back when I first started feeling this feeling, what I couldn't see in the middle of that holy restlessness was that the hunger itself was the invitation.

It was an invitation from the Holy Spirit himself.

He was the one who was stirring it.

And he was the one refusing to let me settle.

He was the one whispering more because he knew what was waiting on the other side of that.

Yes.

And today I want to talk to you about what happens when you stop waiting for someone else to create the community that you are desperate for and you become the one who opens the door and and says yes to the stirring, yes to the hunger, yes to the invitation by Holy Spirit himself.

Hey friends.

Welcome to Holistic Hearts.

I'm Kristen Chadwick and I am so happy you're here.

Before we jump into more of that conversation, I wanted to share a few announcements with you.

There's some new and exciting things that are happening.

Number one, I want to say thank you.

For those of you who support my podcasts through buymeacoffee.com even just $5 is so helpful to support the running of this podcast.

I appreciate you so much.

It just means a lot that you would partner with me on getting this out consistently.

And I also have been coming up with and dreaming with the Holy Spirit of ways that I can serve you and also bring you a little bit more value.

So on buymeacoffee.com there are two products that I've put up in my shop.

One is the option to have an encounter coaching session with me.

One hour.

And this is just a one hour time for you, for me, for a Holy Spirit to pause, to dig in, to have time with just him and ask him those deep questions.

To have space to enter into those encounters one on one and help you by taking some great coaching.

Certification that I took a while ago and jumping into some practical questions of like how do we take what we just experienced in our encounter and walk it out in our day to day lives.

So that coaching session is being offered right now.

It's an awesome deal at $50 and I would love, love, love nothing more in this season than to have one on one calls with you, my listeners who are hungry to meet Jesus in the encounters in your own personal way and would love that honor to do that.

So there's that option and then there's also an option.

I created a journal that is specific to something that I saw on inst of a woman.

Oh I forget her first name.

Strickland, she wrote.

Or she was speaking at a church and she was talking about how there are over a hundred and something questions from Jesus throughout the Gospels.

And so one day I just sat down and I went through the book of John.

Actually it was a few days and I wrote down every single question that he asked.

And one thing that she had described was the Lord had me go through each of those and answer those questions and it started a conversation and I thought oh my word, how beautiful is that?

So what I did was I created a journal through the book of John and I wrote down every question that he asked.

And so it's just a space for you to ask those questions of Jesus, for Jesus to ask those questions to you and just have a conversation back and forth.

So that journal is $20.

It's on buymeacoffee.com Kristen Fields Chadwick I think that's my link name.

Either way the link is going to be down in the show notes but I just wanted to let you know that that was something that I've been working on and I'm so excited to continue to offer more one off products and coaching and pretty soon we might be offering hint hint something in the future with some encounter group coaching and training.

So stay tuned my friends.

That might be in the works here in the next couple months.

So exciting things happening for holistic hearts around here.

Okay, so let's jump back in to creating your own Holy Spirit led small group.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking at a retreat.

A lovely retreat.

It was so beautiful.

Shout out to Albany, Georgia.

My heart just smiles when I think about it.

One woman during the conference came up to me and asked after I had shared a story about hosting my own holistic hearts group in my living room and I call it the Holy Spirit group.

And she asked me how did you start Your Holy Spirit small group.

And I thought, I need to share this on the podcast, because I have a feeling she's not the only one asking this question.

And so today, that's exactly what we're going to do.

We're going to talk about just that.

So let me tell you a little story.

Here we go.

So it started with hunger and my own hunger, honestly, like, I was sharing in the beginning, and I was in a season of digging real deep in my faith, really wanting to explore more of what it looked like to know the Holy Spirit, to move in the Holy Spirit, to experience him in a way that was more than just knowledge.

And God, in his kindness, began bringing women into my life who had already gone after this and started.

Or even women that were hungry and wanting the same thing.

Some of them were seasoned, like years of experience and leadership, and they had weathered the ups and downs of life.

Some were brand new to the faith, but they were hungry and somewhere, like me, who had been in the faith for a long time, but we were hungry for more, something more.

So we started meeting in a converted garage space that had been set apart for worship and prayer.

And there were about 10 of us.

And we would begin with worship, and then we jump into something that felt both scary and exciting at the same time.

Practicing what it meant to actually listen to the Holy Spirit and be courageous in stepping out in faith.

Our teacher in that time, the one that was the most seasoned in walking in the Spirit, would always encourage us to come with an open heart and a posture of a child.

Childlike faith.

And she had this image that she'd come back to again and again that I've never forgotten.

And.

And she'd remind us that when a toddler is learning to crawl, when they take those first wobbly steps, parents don't get frustrated.

They cheer them on, they clap, and they celebrate every single attempt.

And that, she'd say, is how our heavenly Father is with us.

He is cheering us on as we learn to tune into his voice, his thoughts, his heart towards his kids.

One way we practice was simple.

We'd pick one person, and then we'd all quietly pray.

We would listen and ask God for words, impressions, feelings.

Sometimes a song would surface or a phrase or color, and it just would pop up.

It would bubble up within us, and then we would bravely go for it.

We.

I love that in that season, we pressed record for almost every time because we wanted to capture it.

And in the midst of the brave going for it, there was no pressure, there was no performance Just a willingness to go there.

And friend, I still have those old voice memos.

I still go back to those recordings and listen to them.

And when I do, my faith gets stirred all over again.

Because I have watched God bring those words to fruition in my life, and that was over eight, nine years ago.

And some of them have already come to fruition, and some of them I'm still holding on to and still waiting on and still trusting that he's going to do what he said.

That group built my faith in ways I could have never manufactured on my own.

It gave me roots and it gave me a chance to be in wonder and curiosity.

It gave me a safe place to take risks with people, with other women who were all after the same thing.

We all wanted to live out our kingdom, identity and experience the tangible reality of Christ in us.

Because Isaiah 60:1 tells us when the Spirit of the Lord is upon us, and, and my friend, he is because we are carrying the indwelling Holy Spirit.

We are called to heal the brokenhearted.

We are called to proclaim liberty to the captives, to open prison doors, to untie the ropes around hands and feet, metaphorically, to bring comfort in the middle of grief, to exchange what felt burned and gone for crowns that are beautiful, to receive the oil of joy when there has been sorrow, and to put on a garment of praise in the place of Spirit, in the place of a Spirit of heaviness.

And that's what that group did, was we walked a lot of life together and, and in that group, it was this beautiful exchange of the things that we were walking through.

In the natural, we would walk away in the supernatural, in the spirit realm, feeling so fulfilled.

We felt free, felt like there was hope.

We felt untied from feeling stuck.

We felt comfort in the midst of each other because we were stopping to worship and keep our eyes on him, and also to stop and listen and hear for each other, for the sake of each other.

We wanted to bring love.

We wanted to bring transformation.

And that's what that group was for.

We were all hungry for the Spirit.

And that's what a group that is hungry for the Spirit can carry into each of each, each of our lives.

From Isaiah 61, if you read through that, my friend, that is what is carried when we are open to what the Spirit is doing.

And that can happen every single week, if you are willing.

My old mentor used to say something I have carried with me ever since I heard it the first time.

She said, be the hungriest in the room, not the most Knowledgeable.

Not the most experienced, not the most polished leader, just the hungriest.

Because hunger is contagious.

And when you are the one most desperate for the presence of Jesus, most willing to be undone, most willing to look a little foolish, to take a step forward, to say the thing that comes to your heart, that is risky, most willing to press record and just go for it and speak a word of wisdom or speak a word of knowledge or prophecy over somebody.

It gives everyone else in the room permission to do the same, to do the brave thing.

And you don't have to have it all figured out.

You just have to want him more than you want to look like you have it all together and save face and friend.

That is a work.

I am still in that work.

Almost seven years after that garage group began, I decided to take everything we had learned and explored together and open up my own living room to do the same.

We are now 2 years ish in and the Holy Spirit has not missed a single week when we gather together ready to experience Him.

He keeps guiding us through each season, through worship, through encounters, through practicing what we're learning together.

And for example, so this past fall we I felt like the Lord led me to to look at the holistic hearts encounters that he had given me and to listen to them each week.

So we would either listen beforehand or listen together or both.

And then we would share what God was speaking to each of us.

We would practice the encounter, we would practice the experience of Him.

Then fast forward to the spring.

We read through a book called Holy Spirit.

Who is He?

Who He Is and why We Can't Live without him by Bill Johnson.

And I really felt like the Lord in this season specifically wanted us to lay a foundation of who he is.

Who the Holy Spirit is, is.

And it was so rich and so nourishing.

And again, like the original group that I was in, it was a place for people to take a brave step depending on where everybody was at.

It was a place for people to ask questions, to be curious, to practice listening, to practice encountering him, to practice asking, okay, Holy Spirit, what does it look like for me to walk in the day to day picturing you like a dove descended on my shoulder, that I would walk carefully throughout the day being very aware that there is a dove upon my shoulder.

That is where we landed in this season for our Holy Spirit group.

And every single week the Lord would show up.

He would bring hope, he would bring joy, he would bring peace in the midst of lives that were unsett to think big Things were happening.

There were job transitions and there were surgeries and there were conferences and there were all these things in in just the day to day life of motherhood.

And every single week he would show up in the middle of our real, ordinary and sometimes complicated lives.

And that's what this kind of community does.

It doesn't just inform your mind or give you more information.

It transforms your heart.

Colossians 2, 2, 3 in the message it says, I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God.

Then you will have minds, confident and at rest, focused on Christ, God's great mystery.

Focusing in on those little words of woven into a tapestry.

That's what I picture.

These groups of women that I've been a part of, how they have morphed over the years from all the way back in 2017 when we started, that was a beautiful tapestry.

And the way that we pursued the heart of God and His invitation for us to pursue him looked unique and beautiful and designed in a way that was specific for that season.

Fast forward to last year's Woven into a tapestry of love.

It was beautiful the way that the Lord wove us all together our hearts and even this year woven into another beautiful tapestry with women that came in for the first time this year versus last year and some women that their schedules change so they're not here this year.

That is the moving and flowing with the Holy Spirit and being woven together.

So what does this look like practically?

How how do you start a group in your home that is focused after going after the more of the Holy Spirit?

And here's what I want you to know.

You do not have to wait until you feel qualified.

Hunger is your qualification.

Let me say that again.

You do not have to wait until you feel qualified to start a small group.

Hunger is your qualification.

Here are a few simple things to hold on to as you begin.

Start small.

You don't need 10 people.

You need two or three who are genuinely hungry.

Jesus said, where two or more are gathered in his name, he is there.

So start there.

If you have 10 people, phenomenal.

That's awesome.

You can start there.

But what I'm wanting you to hear is that you can start small.

It can start with one friend.

It could start with two friends, three friends.

Just start where you are.

The second thing is to keep the format simple.

Worship is my absolute favorite way to get our hearts settled and into a place where we are focused on the Holy Spirit.

Another format you could do a prompt.

You could do an Encounter episode from holistic hearts.

If you'd like, you could do a passage of scripture.

You could do just soaking.

I have a friend that is from another state and she does just soaking Fridays where they just literally come lay down and just soak in the presence of the Holy Spirit and in the Lord, which is beautiful.

What I've.

What I've shared, what stirs within you as you are starting to think about the people that are hungry with you, what's surfacing for you, what's feeling like a nudge.

That's it.

You don't need a curriculum.

You just need a posture of childlike faith and an openness to wherever he's leading.

You can also, if you need a book to, you know, have a foundation of, send me a message, ask me.

I have lot.

I love to read.

I love to read.

Love, love, love, remember.

I love information and I love knowledge.

And that's why this is so important to me.

Because the Lord is always after my heart because he's like, girl, I know you love to learn about me, but remember, it's about knowing me int.

So if you need some recommendations on books or a resource, just reach out to me.

I'd be happy to share.

I'm also going to post some resources down below in the show notes as well.

So that'll be some ideas just to go off of.

Okay.

Number three is create a safe, low pressure space.

Remember the story of the toddler learning to walk.

There are no wrong answers in a group like this.

No, just go with it.

If it's, if it's not of the Lord, if it's not his voice, then just have permission to say, lord, take away whatever is not of you and let it just fall away.

Blow away in the wind.

Take it away.

It's as simple as that.

Okay.

The goal is not to perform, but prophetically.

The goal is to practice listening.

And you celebrate every attempt, every wobbly step, every brave.

I think I heard this because, my friend, you are being brave.

You are stepping out into the waters, into those deep waters.

And that is amazing.

So celebrating people taking the risk to listen and providing opportunities for them to take the risk and listen.

Okay, the next one is let the Holy Spirit lead the season.

This is an absolute asking Holy Spirit what your community needs.

What is this group of women or men?

What do they need?

What is on his heart for this group in this season?

Is it a book to guide you?

Is it the Encounter series?

Is it a season of soaking in worship?

Is it?

He is full of creative ideas.

He is the creator.

And he is the creator of each heart that is represented there.

He just needs your heart ready to yield to his flow.

Okay?

And the last thing I'm going to leave you with is don't wait for somebody else to open the door.

Be the one.

Be the hungriest in the room.

And watch who God brings to your table.

So here's your invitation.

This week, ask the Holy Spirit one question.

Is there someone in my life or people in my life who are as hungry as I am to go after the deep things of you?

And just one name.

Sit with it.

And then be brave and send them a text.

Invite them for coffee.

Say the words out loud.

I want to go deeper.

Will you come with me?

You don't need a plan yet.

You just need a yes.

And as we're heading into summer, maybe you just try it for the summer.

Because somewhere out there, there is a mom.

There is a woman sitting at a table or doing the dishes or running her errands, and she has that same feeling, feeling full of information and starving for real meat.

To experience God's goodness with other women, with other women.

And maybe, maybe God is waiting for you to be the one who sets a different kind of table, who invites them into their home, who says, let's get after it.

Be the hungriest in the room, my friend.

And the rest is gonna follow.

A few books I'm gonna mention before I sign off here, because these were helpful for me and are helpful for me, is you May all Prophesy by Stephen Thompson is a really gentle, accessible entry point into prophetic listening.

And it's really great for groups.

That's what we started in the very beginning, who want to hear God's voice without feeling intimidated.

Another book is Holy Listening by Margaret Gunther.

It's a beautiful, contemplative guide to spiritual direction and the art of truly listening to God and to each other.

And then the third one, Basic Training for the Prophetic Ministry Workbook by Chris Valatin, that is more of a structured and practical workbook if your group wants a framework to work through together.

Okay.

So thank you, you guys, for listening.

Thanks for being here today.

If this episode stirred something in you, I would love to hear about it.

Come find me over on instagram @Kristen Fieldschadwick and tell me, are you going to send that text?

Are you going to reach out to that friend?

If this episode encouraged you, would you share it with a friend who might be hungry, too?

Let's get this episode into the hands of the women who are ready to say yes who just need that gentle nudge of like.

Go for it, girl.

Open up your heart in your home.

It's time.

It's time for the Holy Spirit to come.

All right.

Until next time, keep your heart open, keep your posture soft, and keep going after more of him.