Summer 2025 Small Groups

Alpha Course

Are you a new Christian, newly baptized, or new to Stockton Covenant? Pastors Fil and Juana would love to help you take the next steps of faith. Please contact them to get started in this study that asks great questions and unpacks Christian beliefs.

The Book of Philemon

In our small groups this summer, we will spend THREE sessions studying ONE chapter—Paul’s letter to Philemon. Did you know that the letter to Philemon is about an escaped slave, Onesimus? …And that Philemon was a leader of the Church in Colossae? …And that Onesimus had become a Christian and had been ministering alongside Paul? NOW WHAT?!!  Join a small group or download the materials to find out.

Let’s get started with a paragraph by amazing author and historian Thomas Cahill, from his book Desire of the Everlasting Hills, about Paul’s letter to Philemon:



Paul’s insistence to Philemon that there are no slaves, only brothers, will prompt Patrick of Ireland in the fifth century to condemn as immoral all trade in human beings, then lead the Anabaptists in the late seventeenth century to the conviction that slavery is against God’s Word, then induce the Abolitionists of the nineteenth century to raise a universal agitation against the “peculiar institution,” and finally fire Martin Luther King in the twentieth century to demand that Americans erase the residual effects of slavery. And far beyond America’s borders, everyone who fights to dismantle systems of class and economic oppression, who seeks to establish human rights and universal brotherhood, is, like Onesimus, a child begotten by Paul.