Finding Truth

Mention the word “accountability” in any group and you will start a passionate discussion.

 Everybody I’ve talked to wants their boss, their children’s teachers, police officers, politicians and especially their church leaders to have lots of accountability. So, what exactly is accountability? Is it what happens after you’ve been caught? Think about Jim Baker. Is it that look you get from your spouse when you order one more drink? And more importantly how do I receive and give accountability?

The dictionary definition looks like this; “the state of being accountable, liable, or answerable.”

And this is what some your small group people want? Usually they want to hand it out but are not quite as eager to receive it. The men’s group I belong to wrestled with this for a long time. We finally decided to start with a basic set of accountability questions that we would ask each other every time we met. The idea and the initial questions came from our church staff but before we could start we needed to establish some ground rules.

Everybody in the group was scared and nervous about asking accountability questions. We even had a few people that were pretty sure they would leave the group if we started asking these questions. So we started with some rules:

Rule number 1: What is said in the group stays in the group.

Rule number 2: Leave your judgment at the door.

The only way accountability will work is if the group is safe and supportive. In the end, our desire to be closer with God took over. It’s hard to come “clean” with the people you know and respect but the result can only be described as freedom. Even though our group has been asking the questions for a few years we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of accountability. So what are the questions?  They can be different for every group, there is no perfect list…

I’ll leave you with the first question: Have you been in the Word?