11 Principles for Improving Your Church’s Small Groups

This week I received a question about small groups from a friend. I have put below my best advice about small groups.  I oversaw small groups at a church for about four years.  We had about 500 people in attendance and had around 35 small groups with 350 people involved. 

Dear Andy,

The leadership has noticed the necessity of and plans to develop our church into a church of Small Groups . . . I know it’s tough to judge what small groups would look like at any given church, but I’ve been wrestling with what I know of small groups and what I know of this church and it always comes back to practical implementation.  How can it be done?  I know in my heart that God will make it what He wants it to be, so I don’t fear it, but I want to be able to offer some insight to our leaders as to how we could go about it.  Yeah… long question.  Anyways, I’m really just wanting your take on small groups, good resources (though I have a number of them), and advice on implementing them!

Thanks again.

J.

Advice about Improving Your Small Group Ministry

1. Create curriculum that goes with your preaching series and provide it for free to all small group participants. 

In other words, if you are doing a 10 week series through the end of John, have people study the same passage in small group on Wednesday night before the sermon that Sunday.  I think this is a great flow.  People dive into the passage and then hear what Pastor Tim says about it Sunday.  This kind of “alignment” leads to church health – as opposed to someone leading his small group through his idiosyncratic view of Revelation while everyone else is studying John. 

The pastor doesn’t have to write the curriculum.  As long as you know the text of Scripture, you or other biblically literate people can write 6-8 questions on the text beforehand.  If you emphasize something different than the pastor, that is fine.  I have never seen conflict resulting from this.  If you get more ambitious, you can make it more and more professional – imitating professional study guides. 

The 6-8 questions can follow different formats: Thomas Groome’s Five Movements or Hook/Book/Look/Took or Icebreaker/Observation/Interpretation/Application.  Photocopy the whole 10-week series together and hand it out to everyone the week before the series starts.  Also let people download it as a PDF from your website.  See the Study Guides at Christ Community Church of St. Charles, IL and the Scrolls of Pantego Bible Church in Texas as good examples of what I am talking about. 

You would be shocked at how much time is spent in groups deciding what to study.  If you provide a curriculum free and it is decent, 90% of groups will use it.

2. Give freedom to leaders and groups to use curriculum of their choice.

Despite principle number 1, I would always say at leaders meetings:

“If you don’t want to use the ‘official curriculum,’ that is totally fine.  You are not rebellious to want to study Boundaries or Experiencing God or something.  In fact, I have a great list of recommended Study Guides which I am happy to provide for you to look through.  But the cost will have to be borne by your small group – sorry.  But you could donate them when you are finished to the church library for other groups to use in the future.” 

I really recommend anything from NavPress or InterVarsity.  Zondervan also does a lot of great stuff with Willow Creek and Saddleback.  Have a list of good curriculum to email to people.

 
3. Just have leader meetings in mid-September, mid-February and a celebration in mid-May. 

Don’t expect that you are going to have lots of leader training.  If they have not had any small group leader training, you can get away with doing a bit more. 

Make the time together very high quality or you will have even worse attendance next year.  Call every leader and invite them personally and solicit their needs and address them in the meetings in a Frequently Asked Questions time. 

Most small group leaders are pretty independent and competent (or think they are) and are not too needy.  If they are, you have got more problems.  (See Jim Collins in Good to Great: get the right people on the bus). 

4. Require that all small groups stop meeting in July and August. 

Or June, July and August.  The field needs to lay fallow.  People will be more enthusiastic about groups in the fall if you stop them during the summer.

Let it be known that people can switch groups when you begin again in September.  Some people are too nice to quit a group they hate – give them the freedom to switch. 

5. Don’t have the small group pastor put people in small groups. 

Placement can be done by a gracious competent secretary.  It is pretty basic.  This is an example of a sample phone call to a small group leader that the secretary needs to make: “John Smith has emailed that he would like to join a small group.  He has told us he is in his 30’s and lives in Kitsilano.  You have some 30’s and meet in the Kitsilano neighborhood.  Would you be willing to call/email John and invite him to visit your group?  You would?  Thanks.  Here is his contact info.”  That’s it. 

Muddle through the overall placement strategy.  People organize groups by affinity (age, stage of life) or by geographic area or a mix of both.  Good luck sorting that out.  Either way is fine I think.  There are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. 

Similarly, there is always a mix of people choosing what group they are in and you assigning people groups.  Again, good luck.  This is always a bit messy – no system is perfect nor need it be. 

6. Having lots of people in small groups is a good indication of spiritual health but it ain’t everything. 

Randy Frazee’s staff finally admitted that the emperor had no clothes – people weren’t becoming more Christ-like through the small groups.  A comprehensive discipleship model using small groups is described in his book The Connecting Church.  They have a multi-pronged approach to having people grow spiritually – see especially chapters 5-6. 

But their approach is radical: they have no other committees at the church – no missions, no social justice, no service teams . . . everything is done out of the small group.  People sit with their small groups in the worship services even.  Everything is organized by geography.  Elementary school boundaries are the way they divide people up geographically.  There are some social class problems that would occur from this (all the rich together, all the poor together) but at least Frazee is intentional about a discipleship plan.  Frazee has since moved from Pantego Bible Church to be a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church. 

7. You will need to cut many programs for small groups to boom. 

I would recommend reading Seven Practices of Effective Ministry by Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner and Lane Jones – just the second half.  You don’t need to read the first half which is just a parable of the seven practices. 

I have put a bunch of resources about Stanley at my Who is Andy Stanley? post.  The most important are Andy, Lane Jones and Reggie Joiner discussing the seven practices at Practically Speaking.  At iTunes: Practically Speaking. Also fantastic are the Drive Conference videos from 2006 for free at Video Player for Five Sessions. 

My bet is that reading this book as a leadership team would rock their world in a good way.  The first three principles are enough: (1) Clarifying the Win, (2) Thinking Steps, Not Programs and (3) Narrowing the Focus.  The problem with how most people “become a church of small groups” is adding it to an already full church calendar.  Ministries compete with one another and small groups may jump 15% but never move beyond that.  You have got to be pretty vicious about cutting other things (basically everything else has to be cut except Sunday morning children’s ministry) to truly raise the level of small groups.  Frazee did this and talks about it in Connecting Church.  See also Creating Community by Andy Stanley in which he focuses specifically on creating a small group culture. 

I tell students never to become a “Small Group Pastor” because you can’t really make that much of a difference in the culture of your church as an appendage staff member.  It has to do with narrowing and focusing which is usually beyond their control and more in control of the senior pastor.  They are set up to fail without a radical shift of focus. 

8. Choose adult Sunday School or Small Groups (Home Groups). 

It is hard to change the culture from one to another.  Whichever is working best, make it better. 

9. If you have a leader that you don’t trust, don’t send new people there but shutting down that group completely is messy stuff.   

If they never do the official curriculum because they are busy teaching 6-day creation, I would not send new people to your church to their group.  But it is hard to stop someone from studying the Bible with other people in their home. Churches split over those kind of official messy confrontations (especially over charismatic gifts in the 80’s).  Do not do shut down a group on your own.  Keep up relationship with everyone involved in the group and keep your supervisors appraised of what is going on.   

10. Small group ministry can be pretty simple. 

Rick Warren’s 40 days of Purpose strategy is quite well done.  Here are the components: have any person host even if they are a non-Christian.  As long as they can provide drinks and a place for people to sit, that is all that counts.  Have someone who is a reasonably mature Christian be in the group.  Have solid curriculum (DVD or written) so people can’t get too far off track.  Have people discuss the material.  Have it for six weeks and then let people quit if they like.  It gets people used to being together in homes and introduces them to the whole concept of small groups. 

11. Realize that it is tough to get people with young kids in small groups but have a couple ideas up your sleeve. 

What do you do with people with kids younger than high school?  They rarely join small groups because the logistics are tough.  One idea is to have them share babysitting costs and have the kids in the basement or at one of the other family’s homes with a babysitter.  Have the people with kids host so their kids can be in another room.  Couples with young kids kids can often meet Friday night.  Have a Sunday dinner with all the kids and families together and have chaos but at least you are together. 

As always, I would love to have your comments.  Warmly, -andy.

For a number of great resources on small groups, see Christianity Today’s buildingsmallgroups.com "The Premier Small Group Website"

P.S. Sorry for the long time between posts.  I have been hearing responses to my Ph.D. applications in March.  (See my post about that process from December here).  I got into three, was turned down by one, and am on the waiting list at one.  So, I have been busy thinking this month.  I can tell you that Duke is paying for my trip to visit them next week.  I will let you know where we are going next year in early April or you can email me and ask which way we are leaning.