Building a Life-Changing Small Group Ministry

A Strategic Guide for Leading Group Life in Your Church

Bill Donahue, Russ G. Robinson

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780310423430
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Like nothing else, small groups have the power to change lives. They are the ideal route to discipleship—a place where the rubber of biblical truth meets the road of human relationships. However, church leaders often feel at a loss when it comes to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of group life in a church, and they struggle with understanding and solving the root causes of problems. Group Life resources provide, in ebook format, the practical tools and training resources needed to develop life-changing small group leaders, coaches to shepherd group leaders, and ultimately, a thriving church-wide small group ministry. These resources include the updated and revised versions of the best-selling Leading Life-Changing Small Groups and Coaching Life-Changing Small Group Leaders, the new Building a Life-Changing Small Group Ministry and the supplemental Group Life Training DVD. Appropriate for individual or group study, the books function as manuals and workbooks that teach and allow readers to process and record information as they learn. Downloadable web-based vision clips and supplemental videos in the DVD help readers explore and discuss topics further. Group Life Resources conveniently integrate with the ReGroupTM curriculum, giving trainers the option to use them together. Bill Donahue and Russ Robinson's Building a Life-Changing Small Group Ministry presents a broad introduction for pastors and point leaders to use as they navigate through the process of establish-ing and developing independent groups or a church-wide ministry of small groups.

Chapter 1
MINISTRY CLARITY
The Foundation for Small Group Strategy

Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.”

KEY QUESTION

Where are we going, and why are we going there?

If he were a group life pastor instead of a Major League baseball legend, he might have put it this way: “If you don’t know how group life fits strategically in the church, you might wind up experiencing total chaos instead of transformational community.”

Let’s be thankful Yogi stuck with baseball, but if he’d actually made that statement, he’d be spot on.

Why?

Because your strategy for building groups will affect every area of ministry in your church. It will change how you lead, how you organize and hire staff, and how you craft an effective budget. What you believe about biblical community and the role of groups will impact how you think about church ministry and leadership development. It will affect how you view volunteers and how you work with them — their abilities, development, deployment into ministry, and commitment to the mission.

Everything — church oversight, scheduling, structure, facilities, training, communication, social media, technology, youth and children’s ministry — will be impacted by the decisions you make regarding group life. Assuming you are successful in building a life-changing small group ministry, it will touch every person your church touches. You must know where you are going so you don’t wind up someplace else.

Clarity is king. Until your senior team has a clear grasp of the role of the small group ministry, you will be mired in chaos and confusion as leaders pursue independent, often contradictory ministry goals. As a result, your program will lack cohesiveness, synergy, productivity, and joy.

WHERE BEGINS WITH WHY

You need more than just clarity concerning where your church is headed. You have to start with answering a more essential question: Why groups? Why is community life so central?

When it comes to small groups, questions about why the ministry is being done a certain way are often tactical and practical. There are the usual answers. The church wants to close the back door where people leave because they can’t get connected. The church wants to shepherd attendees. It believes in discipleship—which typically means additional Bible study. These are not bad things, but they also are not compelling answers.

Everything a church does is a vision-driven, values-endowed endeavor, whether or not its leaders know it. People do not give their money, time, or energy to something simply because it sounds interesting or strategically valuable. Your key parishioners invest for spiritual gains, eternal results, God-pleasing outcomes. Pointing them in a fresh direction, even if it is a wonderful one, will never be enough, at least not in the church.

You need a far deeper starting point for clarity. Something with intrinsic worth. Something that fuels passion and enduring engagement.

You must begin with theology. Not dry, bookish doctrine or some sort of legalistic set of rules. You begin with theology because your small group aim has to be founded on a set of theological underpinnings that connect current and future plans, efforts, and outcomes to eternal truths that trump the merely clever, creative, or functional.

DEVELOPING YOUR “THEOLOGY OF COMMUNITY”

You and your lead team can take numerous approaches in explaining why to your church. Your theology of community may be rooted in some themes within your history or denomination. You might study the numerous books on small groups; perhaps one of the approaches they outline will strike a chord within your leaders and congregation. A season of Bible study using the passages we outline below may also be a source of some fresh insight, which in turn provides the theological bellwether for how you build a thriving ministry.

As you formulate your unique theological framework for the ministry, it should be comprehensive, including some aspects of doctrinal truth about God, about people, and about the church. Here is one way to structure what you outline.

Telling God’s Story

There is no escaping the truism that God is a community of persons — three, to be precise. This starting point signals the direction any church should go as it defines the core features of its ministry.

God always has been a community. He cannot not be one. He is, they are, experiencing this reality as you read these words. No matter when you think of God, he is not just a him, he is a them. God is both one and many, both singular and plural. Triunity (threeness and oneness) is his essence. This is his story.

Every small group dream must understand the implications of the Godhead, for one simple reason: this community of persons is the source of our relational human nature. Looking at God, we discover why we can’t be alone for long. He … they … make clear how profoundly we bear this need for connection. Our fellowship with God drives us to move beyond family to friends, to push out of stale relationships into new friendships, to be defined (for good or for ill) by the company we keep. Being created in the image of God signifies we cannot escape the irreducible minimum requirement each person presents when they walk in the door of a church: they have to find community.

God has never been and will never be without community. Why would we expect something else for those who are who they are because of who he is? Community is as much a part of their story as it is God’s.

But you have to tell your church family this story again and again. The Trinity is vision, direction, clarity.

Telling Our Story

As if being endowed with the divine nature from our beginning weren’t enough, God implants within each person more than his thirst for community. He designed each person, and the community of persons in any setting, to function together.

In fact, for a person to be other than together likely signals aberration, soon leading to twisted mental health. It’s ironic that when someone is messed up, we speak of the need to “get their act together.” By this we mean that they should go away, straighten things out, and then reconnect with others. They really can’t get their act together unless they are … together, with others. It is how God made us.

You see this theme throughout the Bible. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another,” Proverbs 27:17 says. Translation: people will not grow unless they are interacting in a pretty intense manner with others.

You can kid yourself into thinking that another good Christian book, more gritted teeth, a better Sunday sermon, or further programs will do the trick. God knows otherwise. He created us in a manner that runs counter to our instincts. We are wired to change best, deepest, and most often when we confide in others about where God is at work and ask them for intercession, accountability, and forgiveness when we fail. This is our story.

Look at all of the “one anothers” in the Bible. The count varies, but forty or fifty times God frames up similar mandates: love one another, forgive one another, or be devoted to one another. Our stories come to life when one is with another, and in no other way. It is how God designed human beings, to form their stories in community.

Your church must tell every person in your congregation that their story is part of our story. Your theology of community has to encompass all the ways God has designed women and men, kids and students, singles and married couples — everyone and anyone—to live in constant interdependence with others in your congregation.

Telling the Church’s Story

Any good theology of community will weave together God’s story, our story, and the church’s story, with all her global and historical splendor, reflected in your unique local expression in your culture. Community doesn’t exist as a strategy. It is the essence God has in mind as he conceives of the church. When you think of your church, is community the goal you have in mind?

You must begin with the end in mind. The entire conception of the church is depicted in the deep, relational intimacy of marriage between a groom (Jesus) and bride (church). This marriage is the supreme event for which the church, your church included, is being prepared. That means each person who walks into your building is being integrated into a grand love story with the happiest ending ever written. It will be the wedding to end all weddings.

This defines the very purpose for which any local church exists: pulling people together in preparation for Christ himself. A random, ragtag, disconnected, disjointed collection of loosely affiliated acquaintances will never do when that moment comes. God is imagining a beautiful body, a loving and passionately engaged partner, and one who knows how to live forever in relationship. No wonder the standard is for the church to be without spot or blemish (Ephesians 5:27).

When you see the church from God’s perspective, the unfolding of the entire story of the church makes sense. Reading the story for yourself helps to clarify your vision. You begin to see her as she was meant to be:

• Well led and structured for multigenerational, reproducing leadership (the Pastoral Epistles)
• Strengthened, equipped, and maturing (the Letters to the churches)
• Launched with a miraculous, Spirit-infused trajectory (the Acts of the Apostles)
• Built by Jesus himself to be an impenetrable fortress when stormed by the raging forces of hell (the Gospels)
• Founded on the transforming teaching and powerful ministry of prophets, kings, and priests, anointed representatives of God for a people he called and shaped as a community of love (the Old Testament)

There is no end to this story and all the ways it can be told. Tell it you must, or most of the people you lead will miss the point of where you are going, and even more why you are going there. If you do, your church will do for theology’s sake what many will never do for strategy’s sake.

When you begin a small group ministry, you first must achieve unanimity on community, with clarity — that is, agreement on why your church does groups. Regardless of your church’s governance model or staffing structure, your core leaders have to be clear about direction and about theology. The slightest haziness about why you are building groups will soon become a blinding fog if you ignore it.

SHARPENING YOUR COMMUNITY FOCUS

One of the by-products of well-formulated doctrine is how it illuminates God’s truth. A good systematic theology is like a road map through the ins and outs of Scripture. A theology of community will provide a fresh pair of lenses through which everyone can perceive, often for the first time, previously unseen biblical guidance into community.

Grab your Bible, put on your “community glasses,” and look intensely at these foundational community passages (see appendix 1 for detailed description):

Genesis 1:24 – 28

Genesis 2:18 – 25

Genesis 6 – 9

Genesis 15 – 17

Exodus 18

Psalm 133

Proverbs 15:22; 18:24

Ecclesiastes 4:9 – 12

Ezekiel 34

Mark 3:14 John 17

Acts 2:41 – 47; 4:32 – 37; 6:1 – 7

Romans 12 1

Corinthians 12

Ephesians 2, 4

1 Peter 5:1 – 4

Theology matters. The Bible matters. When it comes to building biblical community and practicing godly leadership, the Scriptures mince no words. They speak with sparkling clarity to every congregation, pastor, and group leader. If you are a leader in the group life ministry you must own these texts, allowing them to sink deeply into your heart and soul.

Meditate on them; embed them in your mind; keep them on the tip of your tongue. When you talk about group life these passages should shape your words and shore up your convictions. They, and the fundamental ideas they embody, should trigger a flood of passionate, heartfelt emotion. They can never remain abstract verses and instead will be a barometer for your zeal for the vision and mission you carry for small group ministry.

LEADING WITH THEOLOGICAL VISION AND BIBLICAL VALUES

Getting your theological footing on community has practical importance in terms of small group strategy. You need to lead your congregation standing on solid ground. Allowing vision and values to guide you is far more effective than using any novel tactic, challenging goal, or clever program. Here is why.

It keeps the bar high when compromise sets in. Deciding to build a small group ministry means changing existing programs. We’ll talk later about the specifics, but building an ever-expanding network of small groups might conflict with the beloved programs of key members, church traditions, entrenched events, pet projects and worship service formats, terminology, denominational mandates, staff and volunteer roles, and many other issues you d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• Introduction: Change Is Possible
• Chapter 1: Ministry Clarity: The Foundation for Small Group Strategy
• Chapter 2: Point Leadership: The Architect of Ministry Development
• Chapter 3: Unified Structure: Implementing a Coaching Strategy
• Chapter 4: Leadership Development: Developing Leaders Who Develop Leaders
• Chapter 5: Connection Strategy: A Place Where Nobody Stands Alone
• Chapter 6: Group Variety: Expanding Group Life to Foster Spiritual Growth
• Chapter 7: Open Groups: Reproducing Leaders and Groups
• Chapter 8: Measuring Progress: Assessing Your Ministry’s Next Steps
• Chapter 9: Leading Change: Breaking through Barriers
• Chapter 10: Strategic Planning: Key Questions for Data Gathering
• Epilogue: End with the Beginning in Mind
• Appendix 1: Reading the Bible with an Eye for Community
• Appendix 2: Popular Group-Ministry Models
• Appendix 3: Strategic Planning Grid and Work Pages
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Books in the Groups That Grow Series
• Copyright
• About the Publisher
• Share Your Thoughts