Make sure the senior pastor isn’t in a group. If small groups aren’t modeled by the pastor, they won’t have much of a chance for success. (Amy and I host two small groups in our home.)
Make sure the senior pastor doesn’t talk about small groups. If small groups don’t ever find their way into a sermon, it will help reduce the likelihood of success.
Make sure small groups are not staffed or resourced properly. To guarantee your groups fail, don’t staff them, buy them curriculum, announce them, or get your best volunteers involved.
Make sure small group leaders aren’t trained. When you do get some small group leaders, don’t train them. Let them figure it out on their own.
Make sure the church doesn’t address childcare needs. Pretend like all small groups don’t have any child care needs. Don’t open the church one or two nights a week to provide child care. Don’t pay for childcare like I’ve heard North Point does. Ignore childcare needs completely.Make sure the church doesn’t have a small group vision or philosophy.
Let people do whatever they want without any direction or oversight.
Make sure your groups become inward-focused and never multiply. Don’t ever encourage your groups to give life to new groups. Allow them to grow inward-looking. Better yet, hope they become filled with negative and critical church members.
Make sure to require your church attenders to do so many other things they’ll never want to be in small groups. Ask people to go to Sunday night church, Wednesday night church, committee meetings, Sunday school, etc. If you keep them so busy, you can ensure they won’t participate in small groups.
Make sure not to require staff members to be involved. If your staff (or key leaders) isn’t in groups, that will help keep others from being in groups.
Make sure you never make small groups a membership or partnership requirement. Be a low-expectation church. While you’re at it, don’t ask people to serve, pray, witness, or give sacrificially either.
Based on your experience, what would you add to this list? Where do you agree? Disgaree?
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
How To Be Sure Your Small Group Ministry Will Fail
on how to be sure the small group ministry fails at your church:
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5 comments:
Looks like a good strategy for ensuring the failure of small groups.
Excellent work.
Make sure your small group becomes a group therapy session.
I agree mostly, though I think one of the later items may be easily misinterpreted -- the one about asking your members to be involved with Sunday school, Sunday evening and midweek services, etc. I think that too many commitments can have people not be involved in small groups, as the item says. My question, I guess, is: how many things do you NOT do as a church; how many things do you NOT ask the body to be engaged in corporately, so that the small group ministry may prosper instead?
I'm not sure where he's really coming from, but I think I understand that the point of his sarcasm is to see small groups succeed by avoiding these kinds of mistakes. While that's fine, it doesn't by itself make a good case for the success of small groups or how that success would be defined.
I can certainly identify with some of the points from my own experience. I saw a pastor pump small groups for one Sunday. Two started by qualified elders. My family attended but we were the only ones. After that, we never heard of them again. You could point to any of the listed reasons as to why, but it's evident that for another reason it just doesn't matter because it's obvious that small groups are not important there, despite what the pastor said on the contrary the one Sunday. I believe he was only determined not to lack something that someone else might think is important.
The thing that really attracted me to reply was the comments about child care. I dislike it when churches age segregate. It's my opinion and I don't make it a point to tell people there is only one way to do church meetings right.
The kind of child care he's talking about here is day care and babysitting. Sometimes it might include religious instruction at an "age appropriate level."
I think the origins of the idea are bad, the practice is bad, and the results are bad.
The idea does not come from God's word, but from modern institutionalism. It comes from the ideas of modern institutional schools, and the industrial occupations that employed women away from home. I'm not arguing that employing women is wrong - but that "day care" came about as a result of women forsaking the home for an institutional workplace away from their children.
The practice is bad because it breaks the family structure that God created. It assumes that a family can learn and grow better if they are separated rather than together. It denies the family members the opportunity to interact with one another when they should be most aware of the presence of God in their relationships with one another. It likewise relieves them of the duties God has trusted to them when God has not relieved them.
The result is bad because the church family fails to interact beyond age boundaries. Single people don't learn a clue about the children that are kept away. The children are secluded from the elderly. Little boys don't see their fathers modeling proper interaction with godly men.
One of the best opportunities of small groups is for the church to meet without feeling compelled to put the little ones away for fear they would spoil the adult entertainment. Small groups are sometimes the only opportunity for the church family to interact in the roles God gave them rather than the roles expected by the pre-conceived notions of church services.
Amen on the childcare bullet.
A local church homegroup we used to faithfully attend a few years back handled childcare by having us each husband/wife couple take turns looking after everyone else's kids in the finished basement of the host's house (that was in the Midwest, where people have basements) - simple, free and it worked.
Now that we have moved, and are attending another local church in the Southwest, childcare is not even really thought of for homegroup. We bring the kids along anyways, but it usually doesn't work out too well. It seems the church really means for homegroups to be nice cozy get togethers for the young upwardly mobile without children. Its a shame, but we know from past experience it doesn't need to be that way. We have thought of quitting many times (but haven't) because of the childcare complexities associated with an evening at homegroup.
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