Waves Church is now offering midweek small groups at community members’ homes both on and off-campus to help students expand their relationship with God beyond their Sunday meetings.
Following Waves Church’s one-year anniversary, Lead Minister Taylor Walling wanted to continue developing the church’s community by following the Pepperdine tradition of hosting gatherings inside professors’ homes. These small groups started up again Sept. 3. This tradition, which had mostly stopped since COVID-19, is one of the best things about Pepperdine, Walling said.
“The access and the number of opportunities in the homes of faculty and staff was one of the best things about Pepperdine,” Walling said. “And ever since COVID, it’s been one of the slowest things to come back at the pace that everything else has come back.”
Waves Church is answering the demand of students throughout their community by offering three days a week to gather in small groups. These groups will gather on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, offering spaces for students to connect with professors and each other, continuing on a long Pepperdine tradition of gathering in faculty’s homes.
Student Demand
Students throughout the Waves Church community immediately started asking about small groups as soon as Connections Director Jenn Gash joined the church staff in January, Gash said.
“When I started in January, pretty much immediately students were asking like, ‘are we doing small groups?’” Gash said.
Third-year law student Emma Perkins is one of those students who thought small groups would be a great addition to Waves Church.
“I’m excited to be in a small group that I don’t even know who is in my small group yet, but it won’t be my close friends,” Perkins said.
The Waves Church midweek group model allows for these small groups to be of mixed gender, age group and life stage to help facilitate friendship outside of a student’s own circle, Gash said.
The chance to get to know people she otherwise wouldn’t interact with and gain older mentors was a big draw for Perkins.
“I think it’s really important to be poured into, specifically by older mentors,” Perkins said.
Even students who initially joined because of their friends, like junior Judah Fullman, said they think these mixed small groups will be a good way to build community within a growing church.
“You have to sort of create those stronger pockets to have a whole,” Fullman said. “There’s only so much saying ‘hi’ to each other after the singing just before the sermon can actually do to build community.”
These small groups are open to the community and students can sign up now, Walling said.
“Opportunities to slow down in the middle of the week, spend time together, open God’s word, pray – those are all ways that we grow closer to each other but also that we are encouraged in our faith,” Walling said.
History of Small Groups on Campus
While this is the first time that Waves Church is hosting small groups, it is not the first time small groups have played an important part of the church scene on campus, Falon Barton, campus minister for University Church of Christ said.
“University Church of Christ used to do house groups when I was a student,” Barton said. “It was right around the time I was a student that they started.”
These small groups allowed students to partake in a diverse group of other students while communing in the home of someone on campus, according to Barton.
“It was mostly a time of fellowship and enjoying time together,” Barton said.
However, these house groups were disrupted during COVID and proved difficult to bring back once students returned to campus, Baron said.
“There was just still too many people in our community, both in our church community and in the Pepperdine community, who were hesitant enough about being in crowds,” Barton said. “It just didn’t really gain any traction at the time.”
Despite the initial COVID-19 hesitancy, University Church of Christ does offer a variety of small groups throughout the week, according to the University Church of Christ small groups page.
The importance of being able to gather in professors’ homes and have conversations in smaller settings is important, Gash said.
“Following Jesus is about more than attending a Sunday service,” Walling said. “So even though we launched with a simple model, our desire is to provide robust church community for the people who are a part of Waves Church.”
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Contact Mackenzie Krause via email: mackenzie.krause@pepperdine.edu
