Icebreaker questions are those questions we ask at the beginning of studies to get people talking. Some ministry leaders consider them a waste of time and want to jump right into a study or lesson, but from decades of ministry, I think they are essential. Following is the podcast of this content and below that, the text.
Here’s why and some ways to use them.
We all want, or we say we want to create community in our various groups, Bible studies, etc. And obviously, the way to create community is for people to get to know each other. But that isn’t easy.
It can take a long time to find out about someone’s family of origin and the amount and ways of caring expressed in the family as they were growing up.
Or
You can ask the ice-breaker—what was your favorite kind of birthday cake when you were growing up?
I did that in a recent group and found that a lady who came from a well-off, military family who, never had a birthday party. Or another whose father (a shy, quiet man at church) put on full-scale movie set recreations for hers. Or another who had a sibling that always got extravagant parties and he didn’t get any, granted the sibling’s BD was in August and parties at the park were a big deal and his was the day after Christmas, when his birthday was generally ignored—but it was amazing how even as an adult, you could tell in his voice it still hurt.
Or there was the time I asked a group their favorite breakfast food.
One new guy to the group answered enthusiastically, “beer and pizza!”
I could tell many more stories, but the point is, you get to know things about people you never imagined.
One warning, don’t ask people how long they have been going to the church. All that does is make the old-timers feel proud and that somehow attendance means something significant and the new people feel that they won’t count until they’ve reached a certain unstated time goal. (Does seniority matter? How many years constitute tenure? When will my voice matter?)
A personal review of the parable of the workers hired at different times of the day but paid the same might be in order here for all of us when we are tempted to do this.
You can learn a tremendous amount about people by asking very simple questions.
With a new group, I always start with things like:
“Where were you born?” so simple but informative.
What is your favorite dish at Thanksgiving? (you’ll learn about lots more than food)
What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?
Yeah, I ask a lot of food-related questions—they seem so simple but can reveal so much. Last time I asked the ice-cream question, a couple in the group, who were known for homeschooling and a very simple life-style in general—not that they flaunted it or anything like that, but they shared they only eat ice cream from a really high-end creamery in a near-by town—I would have never guessed that about them.
Simple, quick-answer questions like these work well for a larger group—15, close to 20 people can answer.
More in-depth questions can be asked in smaller discussion groups, ones that take a little more time to answer, ones like:
Where is your favorite place to vacation and why?
What special things did your family do on (whatever holiday happens to be coming up) and how did you feel about that?
Who had the greatest influence in your life and in what ways?
The cumulative effect of ice-breakers
Not only do these work to loosen up conversation at the event they are used at, but over time, if you and other members of the group listen, you learn a tremendous amount about the person, their childhood, what they truly like or what hurts them and they still remember.
I’m not sure why but people will reveal things in an icebreaker question that they’d never share one-on-one and that I probably wouldn’t think to ask them about.
Where to get ice-breaker questions
You can Google and do a search for much more inventive ones than what I’ve shared. When I did that recently I found a really great collection at www.churchleaders.com. To go directly to the article, CLICK HERE.
The Practicing the Way ministry group has a wonderful box of Table Conversations—little cards people can pick out and then ask the question on the card. In addition to being ice-breakers, these are great for conversation starters at Potlucks. They are also a way to go deeper into conversation, to perhaps turn the discussion and thoughts of the group to something edifying more than the latest doom and gloom of the news or the trivia of their latest vacation updates.
One more resource—all the study guides from 2026 on from Bible805 for both the Bible805 podcast and the Through the Bible Discussion Guides (that you can freely download from the lessons) have ice-breaker questions of a more thought-provoking variety and related to the lesson in the Guides.
One more encouragement of humility is to always use icebreaker questions—no matter how important you think the content of your lesson is or how you think you need every minute for them to listen to your words of great wisdom—please consider—what people share in the icebreaker about themselves might be the most valuable lessons of the heart from your time together.
One last thing—Icebreakers provide ways to love your people.
Remember the lady whose family never gave her one and for the young man with his too-close-to-Christmas birthday?
Celebrations were held for each one on their birthdays.