Church Multiplication

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 third post:

3. What aspects of group life did you think you would lose by moving from small groups to mid-size groups that you found remained in tact?

There is a wide spectrum of how churches are currently doing mid-size communities of 20-50 people. On the one side of the spectrum, the mid-size community is like a mid-week church gathering with worship, teaching, and prayer – it’s just lay led, rather than staff led. On the other side, the mid-size community functions as the church – sort of like a house church model, with a monthly celebration where all the mid-size communities come together for corporate worship. There is also another spectrum that runs parallel to the above spectrum, let’s call it the missional engagement spectrum. On the one side, there are mid-size communities with a shared mission. On the other side, there are mid-size communities of missionaries.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m Canadian and I love to keep peace, but after all of my research on mid-size communities, I wanted to see if there was a model that embraced the both/and. What would it look like if we created a model that drew from the strengths of small groups and the strengths of medium sized gatherings? Using questions like this one, I developed a different model where mid-size communities would meet every other week, and smaller groups of individuals would meet in the off weeks.

[Read more…] about Disadvantages of Moving Away From Small Groups (Part 3 – SG or MSC)

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 second post:

2. When you met with your leadership team, especially your senior pastor to consider the move from small groups to mid-size groups, what questions arose (and/or what conversation took place) that drove your church to move to mid-size groups?

Well, first of all, I try not to use the phrase “mid-size groups,” since most people like to create acronyms and this movement would become…well, let’s just say that the Asians would like the flavor of it. But getting back to your 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 early 2000s, our small group system was so successful, that we even hosted our own small group conference with Willow Creek’s Bill Donahue. This conference happened even before small group conferences were popular. However, as our church continued to grow, the percentage of individuals in small groups didn’t. There were spikes here and there, but no sustained growth.

Since the senior leadership knew about the problem, they were open to suggestions, but the ideas had to be well thought-out and processed through before any trigger could be pulled. After all, small groups had been such a powerful part of many our church members’ spiritual journeys.

The change management process was long and arduous, but it was well worth it. I could have done my research, written up a proposal, and brought it straight to the senior leadership, but I decided to take the better approach. This approach involved praxis, extensive conversation, and collaboration amongst staff, key lay leaders, and the unconnected in our church.

[Read more…] about Transitioning Away from Small Groups (Part 2 – SG or MSC)

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.

[Read more…] about What Didn’t Work With Small Groups? (Part 1 – SG or MSC)