Scott Boren is the Community Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in Saint Paul, MN where he oversees the development of small groups that operate as house churches which network under the umbrella of the larger church. As the author of The Relational Way and How Do We Get There from Here, he serves as a consultant for small groups and works the Allelon Missional Network as a coach for missional leadership. In his spare time, he enjoys reading books from his overly-large library, hanging out at coffee houses, playing with his pre-school sons and sharing life with his wife, Shawna.
In the early 1990’s, I began working for an organization that consulted with churches in alternative ways of being the church. The founder of the ministry challenged the programmatic way of church life and promoted an organic way of being a missional people through small groups. Almost every day, I would field phone calls from pastors who longed to find a different expression of being the people of God. I remember one specific phone call. A pastor from the Allutian Islands (which is located off the coast of mainland Alaska) called sharing how they had been ministering for 30 years and had spent most of his ministry looking for an alternative expression of church that would impact his small island. I felt honored to listen to his story and offer a little hope.
When the conversation related to the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit, the Apostle Paul never seemed to lack for words. He wanted people to be informed about how God worked in and through his people. He showed no reticence in addressing this topic, as it seems that he experienced the presence of God’s Spirit in ways that we might label today as unusual. It is somewhat remarkable to me how comfortable we have become with doing church without an expectation that God might show up.
How many groups does your church have? How many people are in groups? What percentage of your church is in groups? How many groups have multiplied in the last year? How many new groups have formed in the last year?
These are common questions in small group literature and common measurements for determining small group success. When I first started working with a small group consulting firm in the early 1990s, these were common questions we would ask people to determine the status of their groups. In coaching and pastoring groups since then, these are the statistics that I have tracked to see if I have been doing my job.
Scott 
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