Workshop · September 13, 2025
The Greatest Thing in the World
Our first workshop. We read our basic text through the lens of a slim Victorian sermon on love — and set the pattern every gathering since has followed.
Date
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Time
9:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Location
Mentor Plains United Methodist Church
7271 Lake Shore Blvd, Mentor, OH 44060Cost
Free · a basket is passed
Why this book
Henry Drummond was a Scottish evangelist and biologist who, in 1891, published a meditation on the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians — the love chapter. He called it The Greatest Thing in the World. It is short, plain, and stubbornly practical: love is not a feeling to be admired but a thing to be practiced, broken down into patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, good temper, and sincerity.
That list reads like an inventory. Which is why we started here. Our own literature arrives at the same place by a different road, and putting the two side by side made both sharper.
Our mission names this book directly — the Into Action Group is “guided by the timeless truths found in works like The Greatest Thing in the World.” This workshop is where that sentence came from.
What we did
Mark D. opened with the history of the book and who Drummond was. A panel — Danny W., Scott W., and Dennis R. — then worked through our basic text with Drummond's nine ingredients of love held up against it. Open sharing followed, then pizza from Longo's, then an hour of questions with all the speakers and Bill M.
The whole session was recorded, and a download link was shared afterward with everyone who attended.
How the morning ran
- 9:30 AMDoors open — coffee and donuts
- 10:00 AMOpening prayer, mission statement, and welcome
- 10:05 AMHistory and overview of The Greatest Thing in the World
- 10:30 AMPanel: our basic text through Drummond's lens
- 11:30 AMOpen sharing
- 12:00 PMPizza served
- 12:00 PMInteractive Q&A panel
- 1:00 PMClosing and fellowship
Drummond's nine ingredients of love
- Patience — love suffers long.
- Kindness — love acts.
- Generosity — love envies not.
- Humility — love makes no parade, has no pride.
- Courtesy — love behaves itself.
- Unselfishness — love seeks not her own.
- Good temper — love is not easily provoked.
- Guilelessness — love thinks no evil.
- Sincerity — love rejoices in the truth.