# A small-group Bible study — one chapter over four evenings, with questions for the group and notes for the leader Recipe No. 21, Faith and study. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/bible-study - For: a small-group leader at a church, taking the group through Philippians 2 over four Tuesday evenings - You bring: the chapter, your church’s preferred translation, the pastor’s sermon notes on the chapter (with the pastor’s permission), a commentary or two you trust, and the assistant you already use - You get: one study document with an introduction, a finding per evening with the passage, its context and three kinds of question, leader notes kept off the group’s link, and a quiz for your own preparation - Time: an evening to build and check the study, then an hour before each meeting - Keep it: private while you work; share one document by a read-only link Most small-group leaders are volunteers with a day job. They get a chapter on Sunday, a stack of commentaries they have no time to read, and eight people arriving on Tuesday who expect good questions. The preparation ends up on loose paper, and the next leader who takes the group through the same chapter starts again. This recipe keeps one chapter, Philippians 2, in one document. The overview is the introduction the group reads before the first evening. Each evening is a numbered finding with the same parts: the passage, a paragraph of context, and questions of observation, interpretation and application. Your leader notes sit in their own findings, left out of the public link. The assistant you already use, whether Claude, ChatGPT or a local model, builds the frame and drafts questions from the pastor's notes; you fix it up in the editor and choose what the group sees. It organises the study; it does not decide what the text means. The Bibles on the table, the prayer requests and the conversation itself stay outside know.sh. ## What you will use - **Shelf**: A shelf called *Tuesday group* holds the study and the pastor’s sermon notes, with a line on who meets and when. - **Research document**: One document, *Philippians 2 — four evenings on the mind of Christ*, whose overview is the study’s introduction. - **Finding**: Findings 1 to 4 are the evenings, filed as *Question* and marked **Key**; findings 5 to 8 are the matching leader notes, filed as *Insight*. - **Your AI assistant**: Your assistant builds the study, drafts questions from the pastor’s notes with the line each came from, and writes your preparation quiz, but never types a verse. - **The editor**: Where you cut the drafted questions down, paste the key verses yourself and write the context in your own words. - **Highlights**: Highlight the phrases you want the group to notice, and leave margin notes on the questions you might skip. - **Quiz**: A quiz on the study before each meeting, for you alone, so you know the context without reading from the page. - **Public link**: A read-only link for the group, with the four leader-note findings left out. ## Method ### 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ## Prompts to try Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, make a shelf called “Tuesday group” and a document “Philippians 2 — four evenings on the mind of Christ” with an introduction and eight findings: evenings on 2:1–4, 2:5–11, 2:12–18 and 2:19–30, then a leader-notes finding for each. Draft context and questions of observation, interpretation and application from the sermon notes I have attached, quoting the line each question came from. Give verse references only; never quote a verse. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read “Philippians 2 — four evenings on the mind of Christ” on my Tuesday group shelf. For each evening, tell me whether it has a passage, a context paragraph, and at least two questions of each kind. Where a question cannot be answered from its passage, leave a proposed note on it. Do not change the text. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, write a quiz on “Philippians 2 — four evenings on the mind of Christ” on my Tuesday group shelf: eight questions on the context and the people in the chapter (Paul, Timothy, Epaphroditus, the church in Philippi), each citing the finding it came from. Do not ask me to recite verses. ## Variations - One evening instead of four? Keep the same document with a single finding for the whole chapter and one for your leader notes, and choose two questions of each kind. - For a *lectio divina* group, keep one private document per passage, with a finding for each movement of the practice (reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation) and your own words under each. Nothing is shared, and no assistant prays or contemplates for you. - Reading a classic alongside the chapter? The [reading notebook on the *Confessions*](/cookbook/confessions-notebook) keeps a longer book the same way, a passage per finding. ## Where it falls short - The group reads; it does not write. There are no comments on a public link, so questions and corrections reach you by text or in person, and you file them. - Quizzes are for the owner of the library. You cannot send a quiz to the group; if they want to review, the study itself is the thing to share. - know.sh does not supply Bible text, and no assistant should. Every verse is pasted by you from a translation you have the right to quote. - Connecting an assistant means signing in once, following the support page. Smaller local models call tools less reliably, so check what they filed; Revisions shows every change an assistant made. ## A note on translations and teaching This is a tool for organising your group's study. For questions of interpretation and practice, turn to your pastor and your tradition's teachers. Assistants can make mistakes, and they are not a source of doctrine; check what they draft against the text and a commentary you trust, and ask your pastor to read the study before the first evening. The samples here quote the Berean Standard Bible, which is in the public domain. The World English Bible, the American Standard Version and the King James Version are also free to quote in the US; the King James Version is under Crown copyright in the United Kingdom. Modern translations such as the NIV, NLT, NASB and CSB each allow limited quotation with a notice, and their publishers' permissions pages set the limits. Read them before you put their text on a public link. Indexed under: Bible study, Small groups, Philippians, Leader notes, Discussion questions, Scripture translations.