• ​Make your role known to others so that other participants are aware that there is an ‘authority’ to guide the discussion.
  

• Make people aware of guidelines and try to ensure that the group sticks to them.

 

• Ask someone in your small group to read the text again to refresh your thinking.
  

 

• Keep an eye on time- ensure that an equal amount of time is given to reading each text.

 

• Don’t be afraid to facilitate a scripture that isn’t your own! Good facilitation isn’t about ‘owning’ the text; it’s about enabling everyone to feel comfortable to share his or her reflections in a respectful way.
  

• Set an example for hospitality. Hospitality is at the heart of SR as we are inviting others to read and reflect on our scripture, and we are ‘guests’ when others’ scriptures are being read; modelling this will help others to do the same.

 

• Enable everyone to contribute- SR may feel natural to some whilst others need encouragement. Also actively invite contributions from people who are shy and may not feel confident in sharing their reflections, or may feel overwhelmed by more outspoken participants. One way to engage everyone from the beginning is to ask each person to mention a word/phrase that strikes them in the text.

 

• Keep an eye on the participants in your group- this is very much related to the point above as body language will often indicate whether people feel comfortable, have something that they want to contribute to the discussion and so on. As a facilitator, you may need to look around at participants more than you look at the SR texts.

 

• Keep the conversation focused on the text- you can prompt this by asking questions such as,  ‘Where do you see that in the text?’ or, ‘Shall we draw this conversation back to the text?’

 

• If someone gives a definite interpretation of a text, invite other opinions, for example by asking, 'what do others make of the text?’ or, ‘Does anyone read the text differently?'