Back in May 2013, I was featured on Rick Howerton’s Blog with NavPress for a four day interview on “Small Groups or Mid-Size Communities?” He has since joined the staff at Lifeway, and thus the previous posts have gone away. Here’s the first post:
1. What were you trying to accomplish in your small groups that was not being achieved and why do you think the smallness of group life was keeping you from accomplishing that?
If someone were to tell you that 25% of their church was in some form of community life (i.e. small group or mid-week programming), how would you react? Other than a slight, “Yeah, that’s pretty typical” response, you probably wouldn’t think much of it. Well, what if someone were to tell you that their church had grown by 31% over the past 10 years, but that the number of people engaged in community remained the same? You’d probably think that was pathetic, and move on to learn from someone else.
That was the case at my church, and I was hired to do something about it.
Being a learner, entrepreneur, and systems thinker, I quickly learned and piloted every small group technique and method under the sun (not all at the same time though – I’m not that crazy). I wanted to experience the astronomical growth that the books promised me. I tried everything from a semester model to a sermon-based group model. I even launched new groups every month, in addition to piloting online groups. Sure, I saw growth and new people getting connected regardless of the method that I used, but there was always a bottleneck and people who didn’t want to join. The growth wasn’t exponential, it was additional – and that wasn’t good enough for me.
Now I know about the myth of the silver bullet – and it’s not that I was trying to debunk that myth like they do on the TV show “MythBusters,” but there had to be a better way. After all, isn’t God a God of multiplication? Doesn’t God long for the unconnected to find connection, and for the lost to be saved, even more than any of us do? But what kind of small group structure actually does that well for the majority of the church?
Sure, small groups can be “missional,” but most of the time, any “missional” activity is relegated into a one-time service project that is only organized by a couple of the individuals, and attended by half of the group. Small groups just don’t have the critical mass to embark onto sustainable “missional” activity.
Sure, small groups can have an “open chair,” but how many times have you been stood-up by people who you invited, but just didn’t come? Or maybe people came once, but didn’t return. Why do you think that happened anyway?
Lastly, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. We all know the beauty of spiritual multiplication and how compelling that vision is. But when is the last time you’ve seen a small group multiply and both groups thrive? Let’s say you’ve seen this success, how often have you seen the multiplied group then multiply again and all four groups thrive? I’m Korean and I have pastored in Korea, so I know what a cell church model looks like. And to be frank with you, let’s stop being so idealistic about the small group model.
Something had to change if I really wanted to see my church getting into community and being the church in the community – that’s when we embarked on this idea of mid-size communities.
Have you experienced any of the same tensions?
Join us next time as I reveal what happened when I approached my senior pastor with these findings.
[…] question, my senior pastor and the leadership team knew about the problem, as I mentioned in the previous post. The statistics showed that our small group system was good, but not great. In the late 1990s and […]