How Effective Are Your Small Groups?
Church small groups usually start with excitement and momentum but after a year or two can turn into an inwardly focused and dull experience. That’s not everyone’s experience, but it is common.
Small groups are a good idea though. Jesus had a small group. The book of Acts is filled with home gatherings. We know that a Sunday worship gathering is not enough by itself to help people grow in maturity. Therefore, some other type of smaller accountability groups are a necessity.
Here are some common problems with traditional church small groups:
- They are too small. If you only allow 12 people in a group, it means average attendance is 6-8. This is unhelpful mainly because its awkward for anyone new.
- They never end. Unless you go to another church, or risk offending people, you are stuck in it forever.
- They promise intimate friendships. This promise is dangerous because it’s not true most of the time. Real friendship cannot be prescribed.
- They are not easy to join. If a list of groups/leaders is provided to the congregation, a new person is still not empowered to know how to join a compatible/suitable group.
- They don’t usually multiply. Some groups grow, but most do not. A group that doesn’t grow becomes focused on maintenance issues and stagnates.
So, what’s the solution? In a book titled Activate: An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups, Nelson Searcy details a semester based small group structure that helps tackle the drawbacks to traditional groups.
At this point you probably have a lot of questions about how a semester based system can effectively provide pastoral care for people. That’s a natural question, and it’s answered well in the book. The benefits of the system far outweigh these concerns. In fact, the level of attendance, commitment, care, multiplication and personal growth is significantly higher in the Activate system than traditional care groups. Because of this, a non-denominational church in Chicago is planning to implement the system this year.
If you aren’t sure about checking out this approach to small groups, then download this free PDF summary, it will give you enough information to get your head around how the system works. It is not a replacement for the book though.
If you want to take your disciple making efforts to the next level. If you want ALL your groups to naturally multiply. If you want new people to more quickly find there way into a small group, then take a good look at Activate: An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups.
Shane on February 15th, 2010
The problems you describe are quite accurate. In our church we have a one-year life cycle, and each fall we change groups so that new combinations and new friendships are able to flourish. This reset allows people to feel comfortable and integrate when they are new.
It is not a perfect system - in fact in my opinion it suffers from a flaw that you allude to but don’t directly address - the problem of real relationships. Real relationships come from being friends enough to not just meet once a week in a mandated small group time. It involves being in each others’ lives, sharing meals together, sharing space together, sharing LIFE together. I am not talking about communal living but I am talking about community living - proximity is a key but almost universally overlooked ingredient in fostering real community in small groups. This is because of the culture of individualism and the commuter culture that surrounds most of the big churches.
I look to Randy Frazee’s book, “The Connecting Church” for a rationale closer to what I see as fostering real, effective community in the Christian context. In my church plant, I plan to use this as the basis of community and outreach with my core team.