1. Participants feel more deeply connected to their community.

2. Participants feel more deeply connected with God and confident they are equipped to keep abiding.

3. Participants feel ready to take their place in God's mission.

Each cohort can accommodate 15-25 participants. Larger churches and organizations can offer four or more cohorts a year.

Each cohort is broken into smaller groups of 4-5 people. Many of the deepest conversations happen in those smaller groups.

Just once. The Formation Groups experience offers participants a period of significant spiritual growth that lays a foundation for them to learn and incorporate sustaining spiritual practices into their ongoing life with Jesus.

Many participants do enjoy going through a second time as a volunteer facilitator.

Depending on your needs, the cohort lasts 8 to 12 months and includes four 24-hour retreats.

Between those retreats, participants are committing just 45 minutes a week to engage the material and one another.

The focus of Fuller Formation Groups is growing your relationship with God, God's people, and God's purposes in the world.

Participants will practice listening for where God is inviting them to participate in mission and then explore and incorporate sustaining spiritual practices.

See a sample sequence.

Because all the content is digital, we can send it out through email every week to help your community stay on track. We also co-brand all of the content with your community's logo.

A typical practice has four weeks of content. For example, here is the prayer of lament.

In week one, we introduce the practice of lament through videos, text, and images.

In week two, we offer examples of contemporary laments and invite participants to reflect on the causes of lament in their life.

In week three, we invite participants to write a prayer of lament and share it with their group.

In week four, we invite participants to gather with their group and discuss together what they have experienced and how they might incorporate lament into their life moving forward.

Through research at Fuller, we discovered common practices among thriving Christians across a diverse range of ethnic and church backgrounds, age, type of work, and location. Formation Groups were created to help God's people encounter and then incorporate those practices into their own life.

Ongoing research through our center and the Fuller School of Psychology is exploring the long term impact of Formation Groups across our diverse cohorts and the findings of that research are regularly utilized to refine our content and approach.

We like to start with your church leadership, but Formation Groups are for your whole community.

We recommend starting with one cohort and then scaling to offering Formation Groups for 20% of your community a year.

If you reach a saturation point, you can pull back to just enough capacity for new people.

Church small group ministries can be a great context for ongoing community life, lay-led pastoral care, and for regular participation in scripture study, prayer, and service!

However, few small groups are a good context for a period of accelerated spiritual growth. 

Unlike small groups, Formation Groups invite participants into a focused period of growth. And, they give participants a fresh way of engaging with God.

Pastors love how Formation Groups participants are formed by the experience and bring those healthy habits back into their small groups.

Plus, because Formation Groups only take 45 minutes a week and don’t require a weekly meeting, participants are able to continue in their current small group and other ministry roles. 

Formation Groups are available in both English and Spanish.

Typically, the leader of the cohort is a part of your community. For some churches, that is a pastor or paid staff. For some churches, that is a lay leader.

At an additional cost, we can provide an expert cohort leader for a stand alone cohort.

Many churches and organizations who are engaging Formation Groups for multiple cohorts receive a "Launch Grant". That grant pays for us to send an expert cohort leader for your first cohort at no additional charge. That way, you can see it before you lead it.

Launch Grants require a 2-year commitment to your Partnership Subscription.

We offer a one-day training for cohort leaders before you start.

Also, we support you along the way with training and personal phone support.

We also provide videos of all the teaching for retreats so you can choose whether to give those talks yourself or show the video instead.

When you join us, you'll have a "Partner Success Manager" on our team who will personally support you at every step!

We'll walk you through recruitment, scaling, administration, retreat planning, adaptation, cohort leadership, facilitator training, curriculum, technology support, and discipleship integration.

Yes! In fact, we require you to start with one cohort of up to 25 people before you roll it out more broadly.

Our normal pricing applies for your first year and cohort.

The first Fuller Formation Groups cohort launched in 2016.

Over eight years, we've seen 98 cohorts with 1852 people among 39 partners on five continents.