Training Small Groups to Reach Out

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An interview with small-groups author and pastor Jeff Arnold

Jeff Arnold | posted 5/21/2008

Topics:	Evangelism, Great Commission, Outreach, Service, Witnessing
Filters:	Group Leader, Seekers, Service groups, Train
Purpose:	Evangelism
References:	Mark 2:13-17
Date Added:	May 21, 2008

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Note: This article has been excerpted from the SmallGroups.com training tool called Small Groups and Evangelism.

Mark 2:13–17

What has been your experience with using small groups as an evangelistic tool?

One of the most significant ways that small groups can contribute to evangelism is in a backdoor way. They get you conversing in an articulate way about your faith. And when you do that, you tend to be more open to sharing Christ with others. Plus, if you can get somebody who needs Christ into a group that's authentic—where people are talking about life experiences, intersecting with God and each other, and loving each other—then that person is more likely to talk about what Jesus Christ is doing, or what Jesus Christ means.

You've been writing about small groups for a long time. Have any movements or models struck you as being particularly effective in helping churches move their groups toward evangelism?

I think you're talking about the Achilles heel of the small-group movement, there. People are always tinkering with different ways to get groups out of their living rooms and connecting with the broader world. But I'm not aware of a proven method for creating small groups that are primarily focused on evangelism. In fact, I've found that those kinds of groups tend to be a small minority on the landscape, and I can't name very many pastors or leaders who pull that off on a church-wide basis.

So is it better for churches to focus on creating small groups that are healthy—and hope that those groups grow into evangelism—instead of intentionally trying to create "evangelistic small groups"?

I'm not sure that it's necessarily "better," but it's definitely more common. Evangelistic small groups are just really hard to pull off, and so you don't see a lot of them working well.

Having said that, I think one exception is the short-term mission teams that churches send out. Those aren't traditionally associated with the small-group movement, but I think they very well could be. The churches that send those teams are training people to do mission, to do evangelism, and to share faith. They spend months with those teams in small-group settings, preparing them to go out and come back as missionaries with a different mentality.

So churches might see more results from evangelism training if they viewed their small groups as mission teams to their own community.

That's right. And that's how we do it at our church.

What prevents a lot of churches from intentionally training their groups in evangelism?

There are a couple of things. First of all, it's hard to train people in evangelism, and it's hard to train groups for multiplication. There's not a lot of glory in those practices, at least on the surface. And there's usually a cost. Americans hate cost. We like things to be easy. Many churches are designed to make it easy for people to get in, so why would we expect those people to do something hard once they get in?

Second, in most church traditions there is a general lack of submission. In a Pentecostal tradition, for example, if your pastor as spiritual leader says you group needs to multiply every two years (or whatever the target is), you're more prone to follow it than if you're in a church that's independent, Presbyterian, Methodist, or any other tradition where personal autonomy is seen as a gift.

Let's focus on individual small groups for a moment. How can one leader inject an excitement for outreach into his or her group?

I think one of the problems in America is that we're so model-driven that we don't build around people's passions. It seems like people today are completely fixated on that word—model. What model are you using? How does that principle fit into our model?

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May 28, 2009 10:26 AM

Amy Jackson (Registered User)

This article is wonderful! Our church is beginning a small group campaign this fall, and one of the three main components of our small groups is missional living. This article hits what we're trying to achieve on the head. I think in many ways small groups are the perfect place for evangelism to our postmodern society. When our groups are authentic and intentional - both with growing spiritually and in reaching out - people can catch a glimpse of God's love and mission, and they want to be a part of that. So many small group resources I run across make small groups solely about growing relationally or solely about evangelism and multiplying the church. I believe the best model is somewhere in the middle. It is so encouraging to read about another church doing this. Thanks!