The purpose of the home meetings is to place the missionaries in an informal home setting where a group from the congregation has gathered for a time of fellowship, sharing, becoming more acquainted with the missionary and understanding how and where the missionary serves. The number of home meetings will be determined by the number of missionaries taking part in the conference. Usually, a husband and wife will share together, but in some cases, they might go to different home meetings.

PDF version of this page for printing

To make the meeting a real success the host family should do the following:

• Commit as a family to pray that their home meeting will be well attended and the sharing time will be educational and encouraging to all who attend
• Realize that numbers alone are not the goal, but having a good group stimulates the meeting
• Make contacts with other church families, non-churched neighbors and friends, or interested friends from other churches, and personally invite them to attend
  • Tell church friends you are hosting one of the home meetings for the missions conference with missionary ??? from ??? speaking and encourage them to come. Generally you will want to invite families who live in the same general area of town as you do, and families who are interested in this particular missionary or mission field
  • Tell non-churched friends and those from others churches about the missions conference and how you will have some missionaries in your home for a time of sharing to learn more about missions and this missionary
• Provides light refreshments (cake, pie, cookies, fruit, coffee, tea, soft drinks, water, etc.) for the snack time. The host family should ask one or two other families that will attend to help with some of the refreshments
• Once the missionaries are in town, see if they will need any special equipment for their presentation such as a lap top computer to show a digital slide slow or a DVD player for a mission video and if you do not have what is needed, ask the A/V team at the church to help you setup for the meeting
• It is nice to tell your neighbors of the meeting and that there will be extra cars parked on your street (this is also an excellent time to invite them to attend)
• Above all, do not allow a simple announcement in the mission conference flyer to be the only promotion of the meeting in your home. If you wish folks to come, work at getting them there
• Remember other home meetings will be going on as well and folks can be two places at the same time

A typical home meeting agenda will look something like this:

• 6:30 Meeting begins (missionaries normally eat at 5:00 p.m. in the home of another family)
• 7:30 Primary sharing time ends and snacks are served and sharing continues informally
• 8:00 Meeting ends with a circle of prayer for the missionary based on what has been gleaned during the sharing, for the remainder of the mission conference and the worship on the Lord’s Day if the home meeting is on a Saturday night
• 8:30 Clean up is finished and even the stragglers will have departed

The pre-conference sign-up sheets along with contacts made by the host family should give a reasonable idea of how many will be present