A small-group Bible studyone chapter over four evenings, with questions for the group and notes for the leader

Method

1. 1

   Connect your assistant and give it what you have

   Connect the assistant you already use to know.sh; the support page has the steps for Claude, ChatGPT and a local model through Ollama, and you sign in once. Then give it what you have, in the assistant itself: the pastor’s sermon notes on Philippians 2 (with permission), your church’s reading plan, and the four evenings you want: 2:1–4, 2:5–11, 2:12–18 and 2:19–30.

   Ask it to build the study: a shelf called Tuesday group, a private document holding the sermon notes, and the study document with an introduction and eight findings, four evenings and four leader notes. Tell it to give verse references only. It files everything in a few minutes; the rest of the recipe is you making it yours.

2. 2

   Give every evening the same five parts

   Ask for the same shape on each evening, so the group always knows where to look:

   • Passage: the reference, and one or two key verses you will paste yourself.
   • Context: a paragraph on where this passage sits in the letter and in Paul’s situation.
   • Observation: questions about what the text says. Who, what, which words repeat.
   • Interpretation: questions about what it meant to the church in Philippi.
   • Application: questions about what it asks of the group this week.

   Keep each evening’s title to the reference and a short theme. The index learns recurring names from finding titles and first lines, such as Paul, Christ, Timothy and Epaphroditus. A theme such as humility will not become an index term; find it with Look up (⌘K), which searches every word.

3. 3

   Paste scripture; never let an assistant type it

   Open each evening with Edit and paste the key verse from the translation’s own text, labelled. This recipe quotes the Berean Standard Bible, which is in the public domain. If your church reads the NIV, NLT or another modern translation, you can quote it within its publisher’s limits and with its notice; the note at the end says where to look.

   Do not ask any assistant to supply a verse from memory. Language models drift, and a verse that is almost right, with a translation’s name beside it, misrepresents both the text and the publisher. Let it give the reference; the words come from you.

4. 4

   Fix up the questions in the editor

   The assistant will draft too many questions, each quoting the line of the sermon notes it came from. That is the point: choosing is quicker than writing. In the editor, cut each kind down to the two or three that will start a conversation in your group, move the ones you cut into that evening’s leader notes, and drag the evenings into order if anything slipped.

   Rewrite the context paragraphs in your own words and check them against a commentary. Commentaries disagree about where Paul was writing from (Rome, Ephesus or Caesarea) and whether verses 6–11 are an early hymn he quotes; say that, rather than choosing for the group. Ask your pastor to read the study before the first evening.

5. 5

   Prepare in the margin

   In the week before each meeting, read the evening’s finding slowly. Highlight the phrases you want the group to notice. Select a question and leave a Note: “If we are short of time, skip this and go to application.” Notes are yours, with replies one level deep. Your assistant can leave a proposed note too, with Accept and Dismiss, where a question cannot be answered from the passage.

   Keep people’s private lives out of the document. Prayer requests belong to the people who share them. Leave them in the room, or in whatever private list your church uses, and never in a study that has a public link.

6. 6

   Quiz yourself before Tuesday

   On Sunday afternoon, ask your assistant for a quiz on Philippians 2 — four evenings on the mind of Christ. It writes five to ten questions with know.sh’s quiz tools, each citing the finding it came from, and you take the quiz in know.sh or in the iOS app, which is in TestFlight beta. The quiz is yours alone; the group never sees it.

   A wrong answer sends you to the finding that holds the answer. If you score under 60 per cent, the quiz comes back under Revisit in three days, after the meeting; before Tuesday, reread the findings your wrong answers cite.

7. 7

   Share the study, without the leader notes

   Open each leader-notes finding, 5 to 8, and leave it out of the public link from its own page. Then press Share on the study, set an expiry a month after the last evening, and copy the link at once, because know.sh shows it only once. The group sees the introduction and the four evenings, each with its type and importance; they do not see your highlights, notes or the leader findings.

   Send the link before the first evening. When someone emails a better question or a correction, add it yourself: the link is read-only, so the study changes only through you.