The Relational Mission

Over the last 25 years as a writer, editor, trainer and consultant about all things small groups, and I’ve come across many different motivations for doing small groups. Some of the primary reasons provided for doing small groups include: Church Growth. Small group ministry is a key ingredient to growing a church. All of the largest churches in the world have some form of small group structure.   Closing the "Back Door" of the Church. Small groups are used as a way to connect people who attend on Sundays. This seems to be the prominent goal of most small group resources that are on the market. Evangelism. Statistics have proven over and over again that most people are led to the Lord through relationships with either a friend or a family member. Small group evangelism is dependent upon friendship connections with the lost. Church Health. Research on church health factors has revealed that small groups have the most impact on church quality. In fact, all of the healthiest ...

In Missional Small Groups , I introduced the four stories of small group life, which provide a way of talking about the vision for how we live in community and on mission that gets us beyond church structures and strategies. Instead I identified four common stories that describe typical patterns of life in the church. They are: The Story of Personal Improvment The Story of Lifestyle Adjustment The Story of Relational Revision  The Story of Missional Re-creation In most of the churches with whom I work, the desire is to experience the latter two, but the reality of most people in the church reflects the first two. There are many strategies that can move us into relational wholeness and missional engagement. However before we jump into the middle of answers related to the question of "What do we do?" it is important to talk about the imagination that we have when we talk about things like community and mission. I've found that it is quite easy to use the same word...

As a part of the work I do with churches, I often contextualize pieces for the leaders with whom I interact. The following is a letter to one of these leaders that discusses how small groups strategies must be developed to fit the social location of the church. Dear Pastor Jerry, As you move forward in the coaching and consulting, there are things that I will want to share with you that take things a bit deeper than we will have time to process in our monthly coaching sessions or during the days that I am with you during the consultation visits. I could just point you to some books on these topics, but I want to contextualize some key principles so that you can process and apply them to your situation more easily. In this first letter, I want to talk about church strategy, small groups and the social location of the church. I know that this sounds like a mouthful, but as you develop groups, it's important to realize a couple things before diving into strategies. First, small g...

He replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. ” —Luke 10:18-20 These are the words of Jesus after the 72 returned and reported about the mission on which Jesus had sent them.  They were rejoicing in their ministry success. They were celebrating the results of their efforts. It seems to me that we spend a lot of time in the modern church rejoicing over the outcomes of our ministry, especially when we are successful like the 72 disciples were. Do we turn ministry results into an idol? Consider the history of Christian "movements" over the last century: Missionary movement—focusing on reaching the nations and rejoicing in our efforts when we do. Charismatic movement—focusing on the experience of God's presence and rejoicin...

 Last week, I wrote a post about five reasons or motivations for small groups that I've observed in various churches (See post here ). Here's a quick summary: Small groups as one of the systems required to make the church work well.  Small groups as a way to close the back door. Small groups as a way of producing the fruit of discipleship, evangelism, and developing leaders. Church is organized with systems to make the groups work.  Church is organized with systems to mobilize community that is equipped to live for the sake of the world.  The more I reflected on this over the last few days, the more I realized that there is a progression in breadth of vision.  As you move down the list, the previous are included.  If you shoot for #1, you will only get #1. But if you shoot for #2, you get #1 thrown in. And #5 gets all of the other four as a part of the package. If you think in terms of #1, the vision is small and the potential limited. But if...

It is hard to find a pastor or church consultant who does not see the value of small groups. Recently Rick Warren Tweeted, "A church's # strength & # health is revealed in its small groups, not its pulpit! A Body's # life is in cells, not its mouth!" I know of few that would disagree with this statement. However, the reason for doing small groups varies greatly. Why church leaders put energy into the development of small groups will shape to the kind of strategy or system it develops. When you read the various books on small group strategies, on the surface it looks like all of them are aiming at the same thing or at least something very similar. But when you look a little deeper and when you look inside churches and how they talk about their groups, the wide variety of motivations is revealed. Consider the following: Small groups is one of the systems required to make the church work well. In other words, the goal is to set up groups to make the church a...

Mission, being on mission, being missional—anything having to do with this topic—is popular. Just type in "missional" on Amazon and see just how many books come up. How do you navigate the various options. No church leader will disagree with the call for the church to be on mission, but there is all kinds of disagreement about what this means. The best book on this topic is The Missional Church in Perspective by Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile. In it, these authors map out the various trends by looking at tons of books on the subject. They offer 4 primary branches and additional sub-branches under each of those four. Reading this book is worth the time. I've found that most leaders have not taken the time to understand the kind of mission that they are leading people on. From my research, I've developed a simplified way of comparing the various perspectives of mission in the church. This is not so much based on any sets of books, but on how I see leaders actua...

When it comes to options for how to organize your small group system, there are many. In my book How Do We Get There from Here? I identify four key questions which differentiate the strategies from one another. These are four questions you can ask about the different approaches to see how they are distinct. These questions are: What is the purpose of the small group? How are small group leaders supported? What priority is given to small group life as compared to other activities in the church? How does the church equip small group members and raise up new small group leaders? In that book, I use these four questions to analyze ten different strategies, including the cell church model (which I call the Cho/Neighbour Model), Groups of 12, the Purpose-Driven model, and others). Here's a quick list of the major strategies: The On-going Open Group Strategy (See Small Groups Big Impact by Jim Egli) The Semester Sermon Study Strategy (See Sticky Church by Larry Osborne) T...

The Senior Pastor Does not Possess the Vision for Small Group Life I've taken a break from this series due to our relocation, but there is so much more to say. If you want to view the first five entries in this series click here . Notice the wording I used above. I did not say "vision for small groups" because I've found that senior pastors commonly carry the vision for small groups and promote their benefits. I said that the senior pastor does not possess the vision for "small group life." Between the two is a huge gulf. A lead pastor can possess a vision for groups and even promote the small group program. That's better than nothing I guess. But if the vision never goes beyond that, then groups will never be anything more than a program. And people don't need more programs. A vision for small group life is not something a person gets. Actually the vision gets them. It gets inside them in such a way that they are compelled to lead people int...

I've been asked to write a blog post where I share something innovative in small group thinking, some idea that will help churches advance small groups in new ways. I am excited to contribute an idea. I do have a few. However I find myself fighting with myself as I write about innovative small group ideas. King Solomon once said that there is nothing new under the sun. Every time I read a book or blog that promotes some kind of new idea that will revolutionize small groups, I'm quite cautious. I've yet to find any new small group idea that is really new. I'm even cautious about my own new ideas. What I have found is that most of the small group fruit that I have experienced is the result of some very basic principles that are as old as Moses. Groups flourish in an atmosphere: of prayer, which causes me to ask if churches today depend upon programming more than they do upon prayer. of life together, where people connect in healthy relationships, but most people a...

For some writing I am doing, I have been reading and re-reading some books with which I see things differently. I'm not talking about secular books or books that promote something about which I have a totally different point of view like the recent popular books on atheism. I've been reading books about small groups, organic church life, the missional church and how one can live in missional community. Unlike a popular book on atheism for example, I actually agree with quite a lot of what these authors write. But there is a fundamentally different point of view that I have from most of them. Honstely, I’m exhausted from the endless books, conferences and consulting processes that promise that they have found the secret to church, or small group, or missional success. It seems that every other church book that comes out promises to have found the proverbial "yellow brick road" that will lead us to the wizard's secrets. If we would only follow the prescribed p...

Reason #5 that Small Groups Don’t Work in America: Senior Pastors Try to Be Small Group Pastors For various reasons senior pastors feel the need to be the primary small groups pastor. They lead the church and try to develop small groups and oversee life (or lack thereof) that transpires in those groups. They often feel that they need to serve as the group architect, the group builder and the group sustainer. In other words, they feel the pressure to be the creator, developer and the pastor of groups. In addition, this idea of the senior pastor as the small groups pastor has been propagated for years, if not decades. David Yongii Cho has always stated that he is the cell group pastor of his church. There are those who state that Rick Warren is the small groups pastor at Saddleback. And there are others who instruct pastors that they need to be the primary initiator of groups when they want to start them. Then in the case of smaller churches, pastors are left with few options but t...

Reason #4 that Small Groups Don’t Work in America: Design Flaws Design principles guide the work of architects so they can build sound structures. Architects and structural engineers don’t copy the work of others verbatim. Every building is unique, depending upon many factors including the terrain upon which it is built. If the architect is not equipped in sound design principles, then he will be forced to copy and thereby build something that might not fit the situation at hand. If we apply this analogy to a small group structure, then we need to identify a few things in very clear terms: First we need clear small group design principles. There are many good books and blog sites that are available to equip us all in designing good small group structures. Second, we need architects who are able to apply these design principles to local contexts. In other words, an architect is not one who develops a structure that looks like what is written about in other books. An architect is...

Reason #3 that Small Groups Don’t Work in America: Hiring Program Administrators We hire program administrators to run the small group ministry instead of hiring shepherds who will do the mundane, repetitive work of caring for sheep. Effective small group pastors possess strengths that allow them to focus their energies on caring for people, developing leaders and gathering people around a vision. I’m not sure that this is something that comes that easily for those of us who have been in church leadership for any length of time. Our traditional church structures have depended upon those who are good orators and those who are good program administrators. It does not take long to see this when we assess the average M.Div. program. And look at the most popular books that target pastors. The bestsellers speak to the issue of vision development skills, leadership aptitude and communication skills. I hope that I am wrong, but my observations have caused me to conclude that we under-valu...

Reason #2 that Groups Don’t Work in America: Boredom with the Mundane Church leaders are not usually that good at embracing the mundane. We want results and we want them yesterday. We want something that makes for good testimonies, something that has what they call “sizzle” in the marketing world. After all we are accustomed to building churches on sizzle. In the old days, we had revival meetings, then meetings, and sing-alongs. Then we created seeker-services with all the excellence we could muster. Now we have multi-site with annual growth numbers that are staggering. Long-term small group success lacks this sizzle that we so eagerly long for. It has little fan fare. Small groups work when leaders operate like shepherds. They do the under-ground, consistent, steady work of caring for the sheep. That is hard to promote and measure. It’s different from developing programs in the church which can be seen and measured as we build buildings, develop budget-dependent programs and attra...

A pastor confesses that he can’t figure out how to make groups work. A popular author grabs a confession and says “See, small groups don’t work. You need to do it my way instead.” Another labels groups as a fad of the last decade. Another leader claims that small groups are small enough to care but not large enough to do anything. Then one of the most prominent churches that promoted small groups and developed an extensive network of churches for small group training is no longer doing groups. It seems like many people are jumping into the blog world to announce that their experience reveals that small groups don’t work in America. They proclaim the demise of groups as if their point of view is the gospel truth. And the sad thing is that we embrace their limited point of view as if it is as valid as any other. Welcome to the post-modern world of flat information dissemination. Everyone is an expert. Or so it seems. But we need to have something that helps us discern the elements o...