The Relational Mission

Over the years, there have been a myriad of programs, books, and seminars on small group leadership. Most of them focus on practical techniques for how to do small groups in the “right” way. They address questions like:  How to lead a group discussion. How to facilitate an icebreaker. How to grow your group? How to lead worship in the group?  While understanding these techniques of group leadership is important, I found that doing these techniques well does not make for great groups. At best, you will get good group meetings. Leading a group by following the right techniques is a bit like trying to love your spouse because you follow a set of rules for a good marriage. It will leave you wondering why it's not working when you are doing what all the books tell you to do. The foundation for leading a group well lies in the end that you imagine. If all you want is a good group meeting, then follow the techniques. But if you want a group that “lives in love,” that li...

Group strategies abound. Some refer to them as small group, others as missional communities. There are a lot of right ways to do groups. Some will argue about where they should or should not meet. Others talk focus on things like when they should meet, whether they should be mixed gender to gender specific, whether they should target a specific demographic or be geographically based, whether they should be closed or open, whether they should be long-term groups or short-term groups and whether they should study the sermon or choose their own topics. Should the oversight system be flat or a pyramid? Should the leadership system be based on the advice of Jethro to Moses in Exodus 18 or upon Jesus' strategy of choosing the twelve? And there is quite a bit of discussion about whether small groups of 8-15 or mid-sized groups of 20-50 are preferable. We could talk for hours about the various nuances and distinctions between strategies. Discussions around all of these i...

When I first started teaching seminars on small groups in the early 1990s, we put a heavy emphasis on multiplication of groups. The goal was to grow the group to 12-15 people and then multiply it into two groups. In many ways, this made a lot of sense. The logic goes this way: God wants all people to be saved. The most effective way to reach people is through relationships. Groups are founded upon relationships. As groups relate to people who don't know Christ, they will be exposed to the life and message of the Gospel and be drawn to it. Then they will be added to the group. The group will grow. When the group grows, multiplication will be a natural outcome. So we focused our language on the importance of multiplication, thinking that if we emphasized this outcome that it would motivate people to relate to and reach people who don't know Christ. The result, though, actually worked against our desire for multiplication. We communicated the goal of multiplication by u...

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 ...

Small group meetings are important. If you don't do meetings that well, then people will not want to explore life together outside the group. However, if we don't have much life interaction outside the meeting, how good can the meetings actually be? It's a chicken and egg thing. Good group meetings can lead to life together. And life together generates good group meetings. In order to have great small groups the goal cannot be to have a great group meeting. As soon as we put the success of a group meeting in the cross hair, then we will miss one another. The point of it all is to love one another. We have great meetings to the extent that we see the other persons, when we encounter them in truth, and when we serve the other. Great group meeting occur when we turn our faces to one another and we experience the other. When we value the success of the group meeting over the people in the meeting, then we fail. It's a paradox. We actually have a great group exp...

In yesterday's post , I asked the question related to why it is so hard for people to enter into community. Most of the time, we look for ways to fix this problem.  They usually come in the form of "6 Ideas for Taking Your Group to the Next Level" or "3 Sure-Fire Ways to Turn Your Group Around." Posts like that are needed. But this is not one of those. Sometimes I think we try to fix the problems in our groups without going deeply enough to identify the real issues. So we medicate the lack of community, while we become numb to what the Spirit of God really wants to do. The problem though is that the Spirit of God usually does not work as fast as we want him to. We want to "get over" the problem of the lack of community. While God wants to lead us into the painful reality that we are not very good at living in community. He wants to reveal show us that we don't know how to love others very well. That "considering others as more important th...

 In a previous post , I wrote about how we our core being is defined relationally. We are socially formed. At the same time, this formation has shaped our personal identity in such a way that we set the self over against others. We are taught to look for our core identity apart from others, as if there is some kind of essential identity that is pure and untainted that can only be found in the individual, isolated soul.   This sets up a problem that often goes unnoticed when we try to establish small groups. We tell people that they need community, that we are created as social beings in the triune image of God, and that the Bible tells us that we are called to love one another. Then we organize people into groups and give them curriculum to talk about each week. Thus far things are heading on a good track. But something happens. The group doesn't move beyond the Bible study experience into community. People say that they want to love one another, but the group struggles t...

I'm reading a mind-blowing book entitled Relational Being by the psychologist Kenneth Gergen. He is confronting the paradigm through which we understanding ourselves, which he calls "bounded" identity. That is, we have grown up in a world where we view ourselves as individuals first, as if there is a core identity that we possess that is independent and distinct from our relationships to other people or to our world. In other words, we tend to think about self in one category and our community in another. He lays out the falsehood of this view of the self by demonstrating how we cannot even understand our identity apart from our relationships. The most basic illustration of this is found in the way we are born into a family. We learn how to talk, how to think, and even how to reflect about our own identity from those who care for us as children. Our identity is wrapped up in social interaction. This takes us beyond typical ways of talking about individualism and ...

Last week, I wrote about five things we can learn from small group house churches from the first three centuries. Actually there is a sixth, but the last one is so significant—and so often overlooked in our day—that it merits its own post. This attribute of the early church is related to how leadership operated in early house churches; it was team based. If we are academically honest about how we understand the history of the early church, we have to admit that we have very little detailed data about how leadership operated. Some have argued therefore that the early church was absolutely flat, that there were no appointed leaders. Then there are others who read the modern approach of singular leadership into the early church. We cannot read the New Testament to find some kind of house church leadership manual. We have to enter into the story and read between the lines. And we must be careful not to read our current experience into theirs. New Testament theologian, Gilbert Bilzeki...

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...

The way we lead people is the way people will follow. If we lead in a programmatic way, then people will follow in a programmatic way. If you lead in a relational way, people will be much more likely to follow you into that way. Small groups, missional communities, cell groups, house churches, etc. are inherently dependent upon healthy relationality. So the question for us is: Are we leading in a relational way? In part, leading relationally depends upon the focus in our leadership. Sadly, I've found that we tend to lead groups and pastors tend to to lead group systems by focusing on a "what" instead of "whom." Let me explain: I've been working with churches to help them small group systems for over 20 years now. I've seen trends come and go. I've experienced models rise and dissipate: Cell church. Meta-church. Groups of 12. Church of small groups versus church with small groups. Semester-long groups. Church-wide campaigns. Missional communities....

I'm working on my next book today. Here are a couple of paragraphs that I wrote about sharing meals. Any feedback? When I read the Gospels while asking the question “Where was Jesus?” I’m continually shocked by the fact that I read so much about Jesus eating and at parties. Food and Jesus came together. We also have evidence that the early church most often met over a shared meal. And we know that worship occurred in the early church with the celebration of communion, usually over a meal. In the life of Jesus, we see him relating to his disciples over meals, teaching them over food and even using parables about food. We see him engaging neighbors and networks over meals and parties. The most obvious is that party at Matthew’s house where many tax collectors and sinners had assembled. There is something about food that moves us beyond technical solutions to problems that we encounter in our small groups. Some things are better addressed by eating together than through strategy se...

On our family farm in North Texas, we raised everything from cows to chickens, rabbits to turkeys. We stayed away from pigs and horses, but just about every other farm animal called our farm home at some point. The one species that seemed to impact our lives the most were the sheep. While we owned more cattle, the small flock of sheep were are part of our lives more than any other. Unlike cattle, sheep require up-close-and-personal care. For instance, sheep lack the ability to regulate how much they eat. If food is out, they will eat it. And if they eat too much, they will die. In addition, they have very sensitive stomachs. Therefore a shepherd is required to feed them the right amounts of the right food. Sheep have no ability to protect themselves. They are frail and slow, and they cannot kick, claw or bite. They are easily spooked. They will scatter easily in panic and then once cornered they will sit petrified while staring at their predator.  Therefore a shepherd is requ...