Life Model Discussion Forums

Our website hosts several discussion forums to help people connect and discuss topics related to Life Model principles. Please review the list of forums below, and take a look at any that are of interest to you.

Also be sure to check out How to Use the Forums below

Banana Growers Association

Grow your capacity by reading and sharing stories about Joy and Return to Joy from all of the big stressful emotions. Learn more about staying relational and knowing what it is like you and your people to do when faced with the challenges of life.

CONNECT: Life Model Forum

Connect to people all over the world who are studying and applying the Life Model to life in their context. Pose questions, enter into dialogue with others, and participate in ongoing discussions about life as God designed it.

LEAD: Leader's Life Model Discussion Group

Those who are called to lead Life Model communities can come together here to discuss the unique challenges presented to them. Draw from the experiences of other pastors, teachers, counselors, and directors and share your wisdom with the wider community, so that we can enrich the quality of the communites we lead. (Posts in this forum can only be seen by registered users)

How to Use the Forums

If you have never used a discussion forum before, it can look a bit intimidating. The forum page may seem fairly crowded with lots of boxes and links, and very little direction on how to proceed. But if you take just a few minutes to become familiar with the organization, you will find that it's fairly easy to get around.

The basic idea of a forum is that it is a collection of postings, loosely linked together in groups of similar postings related by some common thread. The most simple way to visualize an entire forum site is to think of it as a big outline. For example, the Banana Growers forum is organized like this:

General Category

• Using This Forum
• About 4+ Stories
• Prayer Requests

Four-Plus Stories

• Joy
• Fear / Anxiety
• Anger / Rage
• Sadness / Grief
• Hopeless / Despair
• Shame / Humiliation
• Disgust
• Dread

Event News

• Event News

In this example there are three categories, ( "General", "Four-Plus Stories", "Event News" ). Each category contains one or more discussion boards (like "Using This Forum" and "Dread" ). Any registered member of the forum can post a topic (which could be a story or a question of interest) to any discussion board (such as 'Joy') or post a reply to any existing topic anywhere on the forum. On the Banana Growers forum, a topic in the "Four-Plus Stories" category is usually a story that you want to share, and a reply would be a reaction to a given story.

When you click on a given discussion board, you get to see all of the topics that have been posted there. Clicking on a topic displays the content of that topic and all of the replies that people have posted to that topic.

There are a number of other features that help you get more use out of the forum as well. We highly recommend that you click on the "Help" button on the forum menubar for more information on the foundational concepts and terms used on the forum, and for info on how to navigate the site and post messages. Please read over the Help page carefully until it makes sense to you. If you are still uncertain about some of the finer points, feel free to post your question under the discussion board called "Using This Forum".