The story of a church who found the first thing they needed to do with small groups was to offer them.
by Life Together
Three weeks into the initial launch of small groups at Church of the Resurrection in Leewood, Kansas, church leadership is still feeling overwhelmed by its members' eager response. The church was expecting to begin with 150 small groups and 1,500 participants, but ended up with 240 groups and 2,600 participants.
Debi Nixon, Director of Small Group Ministry at this United Methodist church, says she ...
Successfully transitioning out of a small-groups campaign is as challenging as launching one. Churches that wait until the campaign is over in order to plan the next step will lose momentum and spend valuable leadership equity. Instead, use these four keys to create a smooth transition ...
Dancing With Dinosaurs is a good, entry-level book regarding the need for churches to embrace the small groups / cells concept. Easum writes primarily to mainline churches stressing the need to change … or die!
Like the dinosaurs who became extinct because of their inability to adapt, the church will likely follow in its footsteps unless it is willing to radically alter how it operates. This ...
How to move people from large group settings into small groups.
Dan Lentz
I sometimes refer to the process by which people get into small groups as the "funnel." A funnel is a device which has a wide opening at one end and a small opening at the other end. Funnels help get things into small, hard-to-access openings.
The idea here is that small groups form and grow as people are drawn to do life together out of larger groups of people. How people get from the larger group ...
In the US, many people prefer to begin in large group gatherings, and then move on to small group community.
Joel Comiskey
In March 2002, I met Mark, the pastor of a growing Southern Baptist Church in Nashville, TN. His church started in 1995 and had grown to 1000 worshipers and 100 cell groups. He was sold on cell-celebration ministry, telling me that it was the most Biblical and effective way to reach people in the 21st century.
"I train our cell leaders to be ready to pounce on every visitor in the church. Our cell ...
Develop the idea of small groups among your congregation.
Mike Shepherd
To Incubate: (Webster) — 1: to sit on (eggs) so as to hatch by the warmth of the body; also: to maintain (as an embryo or a chemically active system) under conditions favorable for hatching, development, or reaction 2: to cause (as an idea) to develop.
Now I know some of us sometimes feel like we are a mother hen with our small group leaders but this article is not about sitting on a nest. We ...
Downsizing can be a scary word—but it's sometimes good to break large groups into smaller groups.
Esther M. Bailey
Downsizing is a scary word when it means losing jobs. It's scary in the church, too, if it means losing members. On the other hand, it's a good thing to break large groups into smaller groups. People are more likely to freely express themselves to a few people than to a large number of people.
The magic number for most effective small groups seems to be twelve. Perhaps that is why Jesus chose twelve ...
If anonymity is a person's goal, small groups can be threatening; here's how to make them less so.
Len Woods
It's a universal dilemma. You have far more people attending Sunday worship services than you have participating in small groups. Why? Is it a flawed ministry structure? Is it a failure of leadership? Most likely, it's just another reminder of the Fall. Remember Genesis three? The first thing Adam and Eve did after they rejected God's rule was to dive into the nearest clump of bushes! They hid from ...
Learn multiplication then addition, and then you can avoid division and subtraction.
Dan Lentz
In school, we typically learn addition then subtraction followed by multiplication and division. In spiritual life, I would argue it's more important to learn multiplication first, then addition, and avoid division and subtraction altogether. My small group experience has been that when we learn small group addition first and then sometime much later try to teach multiplication, it many times leads ...
Moving people from outreach small groups to the larger church community
Dan Lentz
It's been well established that relationships play a significant role in people's journey to Christ. We seldom come to Christ without someone we know and trust showing us the way of Jesus. However, a person's journey to a local church community is not always marked initially by a close relationship to someone in that church community. We may get invited by someone we know, but many make their way ...
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