The primary mission field (the new "neighborhood" of mission) is defined by the average distance people within your zip code are willing to drive to work and to shop. The US Census will give you the average drive time to work, and a conversation with your friendly shopping mall developer will reveal the average drive time to shop. Your question is: How can I multiply small groups across the demographic and the lifestyle segment diversity within the primary mission field? The old neighborhood of Mr. Rogers has taken a turn for the diverse.
Therefore, standardized curricula and uniform group processes are going to have to become more flexible. Most churches are still too "modern" in their approach to small groups … too programmatic, imitative, and too "cookie cutter" in their approach. The small group that works successfully with the clientele at Starbucks just is not going to transfer to the crowd at the bowling alley. Here is the emerging strategy in the increasingly fragmented mission field:
- Focus on leadership development, not program replication. Spend more time mentoring leaders, sensitizing them to the micro-cultures of the mission field, aligning them to the mission, and training them to be entrepreneurs. If you spent 5 hours training leaders, spend 10 hours. If you spent 10 hours, spend 30 hours. The diversity of the mission field means that there is even more probability for failure, even more necessity to learn from mistakes, and even more challenge to let small group leaders mutually mentor themselves.
- Focus on boundaries, not tactics. We all know that small groups require extreme clarity about core values, bedrock beliefs, overarching Biblical vision, and strategic mission. What is new is that embedding that DNA into the hearts of small group leaders has taken on whole new dimensions of "ruthlessness". The more diverse the mission field and the more diverse the tactics, the more "trust" is stretched to the limit. The leader of leaders must mercilessly hold feet to the fire and practice accountability for behavior, conviction, inspiration, and alignment among the small groups.
- Create capital pools for training, not implementation. Surveys about the effectiveness of small groups reveal over and over again that the #1 failure is "training". It is not just training about skills. It is training about cultural quirks and quandaries, training about boundaries and trust, and training about teamwork and personal spiritual discipline. Congregations, or networks supporting small groups, are spending far too little money on training, and the result is that they are increasingly vulnerable to litigation and factional infighting.
As the neighborhood expands in the mobile, portable world, small group strategies are challenged to keep up with the multiplying micro-cultures. It is still true that the postmodern church (like the earliest church) grows one micro-culture at a time, but those micro-cultures are expanding faster than our groups.
I think one of the most significant challenges for small group developers is that they still think in terms of "demographics" and "lifestyle segments". In fact, the explosion of very small, tribal micro-cultures has rendered this thinking obsolete. People travel in affinities today, and those affinities are ever changing. More than this, the spiritual hunger these micro-cultures experience is becoming very specific, for even shorter periods of time, so that small group leaders must accelerate how quickly they can penetrate to the core of this spiritual yearning so that they can prepare for the next spiritual yearning. "Listening" is a tiring endeavor, but it is has never been more important.
The current trend in church planting is the strategy to plant churches that intentionally plant churches. The same trend is applicable to small groups. We need to design small groups that aggressively start new small groups. I realize that has always been part of the philosophy of small group ministry; the trouble is that I rarely see it actually happen. A small group planting small groups is still a very secondary part of the strategic plan for most churches. Unfortunately, love triumphs and the mission dies, and the small group leaders let it happen, partly because they are too tired to do anything else.
Finally, the expansion of the primary mission field (the new "neighborhood" of mission) has challenged small group developers to pay more attention to the spiritual depth and personal health of small group leaders. It may be true that the small group is the primary source of personal or pastoral support for small group members, but it must NOT be true that the small group is the primary source of personal and pastoral support for small group leaders. That support has to come from other leaders and from small group developers. If the leaders become dependent on the group for their vitality and health, then the multiplication strategy of groups is undermined.
Whatever the challenge of the fragmenting mission field, the reality is that small groups (intimate pilgrim companionships for spiritual growth) is still the most powerful method to reach postmodern people. The position of even progressive churches today is akin to the position of established businesses in the 1990's. Way back then, business addressed the challenge through franchising strategies but still found themselves lagging behind the marketplace because franchising did not grow innovative leaders. The same thing is happening for churches today. We need to pay more attention to leadership development, boundaries for innovation, and bigger resources for aggressive training.
