Background
This Midwestern non-denominational church which was planted 30 years ago currently has a Sunday worship attendance of 400-500 (combined in 2 services) and 26 adult small groups (13 which meet during a Sunday school time slot and another 13 which meet outside of Sunday mornings). Total adult participation in small groups approaches 200 people.
The church was started as a small group and grew around solid Bible-based teaching and a rural friendly family-oriented appeal. As the church grew, community primarily happened organically and through affinity-based adult Sunday school classes. The region around the church building began to transition from a rural setting to a suburban setting with housing and commercial developments growing rapidly. As the church began to grow with the community, a second worship was added and more small affinity-based Sunday school classes were launched. However, Sunday school growth (and facility growth) was not keeping pace with visitor growth. By the mid-90's, the church leadership decided to add additional staff to relieve some workload from the Sr. Minister and provide a new structure for discipleship and growth through small groups—a way that was perceived could make the church smaller as it became larger.
The Vision and Leadership Environment
The Small Group Ministry Vision was to connect everyone in the church to a small group for discipleship and care. The staff and elder's role was to be the small group leader's front line people, leading and maintaining contact with small group leaders and coaches and modelling encouragement and care to them.
A small group director was hired from within the congregation in 1997 to oversee and be the point person for the small group ministry effort. A values acronym was adopted for the church called FLOW (later changed to FLOWS) representing the values of: Fellowship, Learning, Outreach, Worship, and Service.
The elder's and staff launched a short-term pilot small group experience early in the process. It was initially designed to be a turbo-group of sorts that would orient and train many elders what was involved in an intentional small group and prepare them to launch small groups of their own. The eventual goal was to challenge every member and every regular attender of the church to become connected to a smaller group of people for the purpose of discipleship (intentional shepherding). Those not connected through this process, would be assigned to a group (group leader) to be prayed for, invited to the group, and cared for to the extent possible. With the quantity of new leaders that would be needed for this effort, elders initially agreed to serve as leaders of leaders (called shepherds).
Each regular smaller group gathering of the church (mid-week Bible studies, Sunday school, ministry teams) can and should incorporate the values and activities of FLOW. However, groups and group leaders have independence to develop their own meeting agendas and select Learning/Serving focuses.
What happens in your church's small groups?
Each group meeting or series of group meetings should model Acts 2:42-47 activities:
Fellowship — sharing in common (ice breakers and social gatherings)
Learning — being transformed by the Word (text studies and study guides)
Outreach — inviting others to follow Christ and join our group (inviting new people)
Worship — caring, serving, and learning with gratitude in our hearts (praying, singing, scripture readings)
Service — having a focus outside ourselves (service projects)
What has been done to grow the involvement of people in Christian community?
To build momentum for the effort, it was decided within the first year of the small group ministry effort to use a campaign-style program to launch small groups across the adult population of the congregation. The campaign used was a 50-Day Spiritual Adventure produced by Mainstay Ministries (www.helpingpastors.com).
New Group leaders were recruited and during a series of 2-hour training sessions leading up to the campaign, every new group leader was charged with:
&149; Monitoring and facilitating the activities of Fellowship, Learning, Outreach, and Worship during the group meetings
&149; Praying for and making contact with group members outside of group meetings
&149; Reaching out and inviting new people into the group (both disconnected church-goers and the unchurched)
&149; Raising up and training an apprentice leader
&149; Prepare the group for multiplication
A key decision during this period was to bring on the Sunday school teachers and train them along side those who would be leading groups during the week. Sunday school classes were asked to transform themselves into a small group format (which many of them already were). The Sunday school time slot was expanded to allow for more time to make this possible and some larger Sunday school classes were encourage to multiply to keep group sizes small enough for optimal interaction.
The Spiritual Adventure campaign was completed and about an equal number of Sunday school groups and mid-week groups met throughout the Adventure period. After the adventure, a de-briefing gathering of the group leaders was held and approximately 90% of the groups agreed to keep meeting.
What has happened as a result of what has been done?
The first time the 50-Day Spiritual Adventure was used, the result was a significant increase in small group participation. At the peak, 60%+ of average weekend attendance regularly participated in a small group. Small group involvement then plateaued at this level and eventually began a slight decline over the next 2 years. In some cases, group spiritual health was a concern.
There were several reasons identified for stagnation of new involvement and spiritual health concerns:
&149; Leader support system.
With the start of the campaign, there were nearly 40 new small group leaders (including Sunday school group leaders), and no relational one-on-one coaching structure except for the staff. In the beginning, the elders were going to function more in coaching roles but lack of group experience and gift mixes made the elders in coaching roles ineffective. A group of gifted coaches was eventually recruited but each of these individuals also led their own small group in addition to many other leadership roles in the church and the coaching system never really got off the ground.
&149; Program competition.
The church has several ongoing programs which require much time and energy both from staff and volunteers. Most of the small group leaders are also the most heavily involved in other programs, boards and committees which diminishes the time and energy that can be invested in relationships with the group members.
&149; Resistance to group multiplication.
Few small groups ever were able to successfully birth a new group or leader. Some larger groups were hostile to multiplying which made larger groups difficult to manage for leaders, and created a culture where some groups began valuing comfort and complacency over mission and outreach.
&149; Reliance on programmed group methods rather than relational methods.
Because many of the groups had started during the campaign program, it was difficult to build momentum outside the "programmed environment." A second and third campaign was done 2 and 4 years after the first one. The result was to boost momentum for small groups, although the benefit from later campaigns was not nearly as great as the initial campaign.
&149; Point leader absence.
After 4 years in his position, the staff small group director left to help lead a new church plant the mother church had sponsored. For a variety of reasons, the elders and staff decided not to fill this position with another paid staff and so existing small groups were covered by volunteers and the already thinly spread remaining staff.
Lessons learned
When trying to build a small group ministry, the coordinated effort of all key leaders is very important. Also, if the small group director had it to do over again, he would start slower and perhaps delay using a campaign until a base of experienced small group leaders was better established possibly through more turbo-grouping.
Additionally, the small group director had noted to the elders before leaving his staff position that the church's experience mirrored closely a report that was recently published that said:
"Churches with between 40-60% of adult worshipers enrolled in small groups are the most common type of North American church that has a declared small group program. The fundamental characteristic of these churches is that a single staff member is responsible for the small group ministry of the church. Besides being responsible for small groups, this staff member typically has additional ministry responsibilities. In most cases, a staff person with the declared small group assignment will get twice the participation that a lay person will, simply because of the time and energy he or she has to put into it. This is the single biggest difference between churches at the 20% plateau and churches at the 50% plateau. Another key characteristic of this plateau is choosing small group leaders from the existing leadership pool. Typically, these leaders are already over-involved, limiting their effectiveness in small group ministry. There are two major distinguishing characteristics of churches with more than 80% small group participation, both related to staffing. Carl George writes, "If the senior leadership of the church says, 'We want all the staff to develop leadership for the small group system,' you can push the percentage up another 20 percent." The involvement of multiple staff in group oversight is a significant difference from churches at the 50% plateau (single staff person overseeing groups) or the 20% plateau (volunteer oversight of groups)."
A key vision and strategy question for the future: Do we feel the Lord is leading us to stay with our current mix of ministry programs (community outreach, missions, praise team, choir, VBS, etc. and have small groups be another one of those programs) that together accomplish the purpose of discipleship or do we see programs being replaced by relationship/discipleship driven small groups where ministry service is occurring in the context of relational ministry?
And some specific leadership questions:
&149;What is the heart of the leadership group about small groups? Is what we are doing now essential in fulfilling our calling to make disciples or do we feel that we can and should go to another level even if it requires a new model?
&149;Do we see staff and elders as being the primary shepherds to each person in the congregation or do we see staff and elders being focused on training and equipping group leaders to shepherd the congregation through their specific areas of involvement (youth, adults, etc.)? II Tim. 2:2
&149;Do we see spiritual parenting through small groups being the eventual way that all areas of ministry are carried out or do we see pockets within the church such as youth or senior citizens where this model will rarely be applied?
&149;Do we see a small group model (FLOWS) being able to be applied to all group gatherings including Sunday School, Mid-week bible studies, ministry teams, choirs, building committees, etc?
&149;Do we as a leadership group see ourselves evolving into a small group of spiritual parents that serves as a model of relational ministry for the rest of the congregation?
As of the writing of this case study, the church is preparing to begin 40-Days of Purpose with the goal of having 40-50 small groups (most of them new groups) go through the campaign, with most of the coordination and follow-up being done by the Sr. Minister and volunteers.
