Discipleship and Small Groups. What a powerful combination!

I visited a church this weekend to do some training for them in the area of core team leadership (versus the old leader-apprentice model used so widely around the world).

One thing I found in this church that I was very pleased to see was a strong push for and a healthy subculture of one-on-one discipleship, much like one might find in the Navigators.

This church has discovered that if new believers aren't discipled one-on-one for the first 90 days, they'll fall away from the church and the commitment they made to God through Christ's work on the cross.

When I asked about day 91 and beyond, I was told, "That's why you're here. Small group life takes over there and we need to strengthen our small groups."

The visit to this church clarified a couple of things for me:

1. One-to-one discipleship is far superior to classroom methods or even small group discipleship. It sharpens the disciple maker as much as it does the person being discipled, and creates a leader of one.

2. Small groups have their unique benefits, but are not enough to disciple the members of the groups. They need the one-on-one relationships in addition to the small group friendships and ministry environment.

3. The combination of the two is seriously powerful. Doing either with great competence will yield some fruit for sure, but put them together and BAM!, it's kicked up a notch to a level that is truly dangerous to the enemy's strategy in the life of a believer.

I know I blog about discipleship all the time and you're probably sick and tired of me harping on it. However, I just have to keep blogging about it until the parts of the body of Christ—who have chosen to "do church" through small groups—value discipleship every bit as much as they value the small groups themselves.

10 Things Every Small Group Leader Should Know

1. Embrace God’s unconditional love. If you don’t “know that you know” and you’re at peace with your relationship with God and more importantly, his relationship with you, you will not be able to love others unconditionally. Petition him to show you how much he loves you and he will be happy to do it. He’s just that kind of Pappa!

2. Maintain a clear and compelling personal vision for your group as a whole as well as the individual members of your group. This will help you make decisions when things get fuzzy and remind you of why you are doing what you’re doing when things get tough (and they will!).

3. Small group leadership is more about friendship than any other single component. If you invest in the lives of your members and invite them to invest in you, you’ll impact people in ways they will never forget.

4. You are not supposed to carry the weight of your group. Excellent small group leaders involve others in planning and execution in every aspect of the biblical community… meetings, outreach events, social activities, ministry time in the group, ministry and servanthood outside the meeting, etc.

5. Focus on Christ in your midst to experience his presence, power, and purposes for your lives when you come together. During worship, invite each person to give up his or her personal agenda to receive ministry, offer ministry, do the talking, remain silent, etc. When we gather in his name and expect him to do powerful things in our midst in which we will follow, the meeting becomes transformational for those in attendance.

6. Be a disciple, (not just a convert). Converts know God saved them and expect to be spoon-fed regularly for sustenance. Disciples have taken personal responsibility for their spiritual maturity and feel themselves with prayer, digging into the Word, fasting, and reading books that help them become a better disciple and more importantly a disciple-maker.

7. Your mental model as a small group leader should be the same as a parent. Actively raise your members so they want to grow in maturity, move out of the house, start a family of their own, and give you a bunch of spiritual grand babies! Small group leadership all about developing a legacy… tell your group this is your end-goal in life with them. Rinse and repeat often because they’ll forget!

8. Focus on the 6 days and 22 hours between meetings. That’s where the real ministry and personal transformation occurs. Leaders always focus on the meeting because it’s where their position is viewed most publicly. However, if you invest in your members between meetings then everyone feels more comfortable in the meeting and they'll share openly.

9. Reaching people for Christ requires bi-directional servanthood and cross-pollination. For people to see you as a genuine friend, you must ask them to help you and serve you as well as serving them. Additionally, you must involve your unbelieving friends in the activities and lives of other members of your group to win them to Christ and actually disciple them. It takes a village to reach someone for Jesus and support them as they embrace Lordship!

10. You cannot do the next cool thing God wants to do with you until you give away what you’re currently doing. Who could you develop to take over your group so you can start another group, assume the role of a coach, take a staff position, or plant a church? This may seem scary right now, but that’s because you haven’t given away what you’re doing. As soon as you do, you’ll see your spiritual future (your next step) in a very exciting way. Trust me on this one!

Choosing a small group model. Just say no.

When researching various models of small group organization and structure, many pastors adopt a model before they have started their first group. What's wrong with this?

1. It puts the visionary's focus on a structure, not the member's values that make just about any small group structure work great. Frankly, if one's members are reaching the lost and discipling them successfully, any small group structure will work well.

2. The structure chosen in advance cannot take into account the actual and ongoing needs of the ministers (members) in the groups, making them feel as if they're a new cog in someone else's clockworks from the beginning.

3. Choosing a structure in advance promotes a false sense of security, which keeps pastors from experimenting with or prototyping various models before deciding upon one.

The smart pastor ignores the hype around the models written about or those featured in mega church conference plenary sessions. He focuses on developing a healthy biblical community that experiences the presence, power, and purposes of Christ. Out of this, he will see what leader to coach ratio will be most profitable for his church at that time in ministry.

A great illustration to drive home this point would be buying a suit out of a mail order catalog. The model looks great wearing it, but everyone knows it's gonna look horrid on you once you take it out of the box and try it on. A man's suit needs to be tailored to fit properly, doesn't it?

Don't wear other church's clothing. Develop your first groups, invest your time ensuring they're healthy and growing, and then add the support they need in the way of training leaders and inserting coaches over groups. Your model will then be your model, not another church's model you tried to replicate poorly.

If you must replicate something from another church, figure out how they disciple new believers into spiritual maturity and make it work with a handful of members. When you refine this, you'll be well on your way to a successful small group ministry.

Supply and Demand

Yesterday I visited with yet another pastor who asked for advice on how to keep up with small group ministry due to the massive influx of people each week to the congregational gatherings. They're in a new housing development area of the country and dozens of people move into the neighborhoods surrounding the church building each week. By simple geography (location of the building) and the non-denominational name the church has on the signage, three, four, or five new families visit each week.

So what's a church supposed to do to assimilate all these people into small groups?

My advice? Set the bar for church membership higher than having a pulse and a checkbook. Far too many pastors see the influx of consumer Christians and want to keep them... but if the children's ministry isn't Disney-quality and something is expected in the way of servanthood early on in the process of becoming a part of the church body, the visitors walk.

And they should. They're looking for entertainment and a feel-good message with little to no commitment. That's the polar opposite of your church's mission statement, even though I have no idea what your mission statement might be.

Missional-driven churches invite believers to join them who possess a subset of the church's mission. Consumers can find a church service to watch on TV or go to a spectator-accommodating gigachurch like the half-dozen we have here in Houston if they want to be entertained.

Take Evergreen Church in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area as a good example. They have tons of visitors each week, but require every member to work in the children's ministry on rotation. The pastor told me this requirement weeds out a lot of visitors who just want to be entertained.

Or, visit TOUCH Family, the church my dad planted with Bill Beckham here in Houston. There is no membership beyond understanding that everyone who is a part of the church is a missionary and has a person mission that requires participation with others in their small group for support, discipleship, ministry, and outreach. If you don't see yourself as a missionary, well, go find a church that encourages pew warming (and a decent tithe check to pay for the programs and the light bill).

I guess it all comes down to this: What kind of people are you attracting to your church? Consumers or producers? Cater to the consumers and you'll never have enough small groups for them to visit. The groups will swell so quickly that members will look at the prospect of leading a group of strangers and say "no thanks."

What I'd love to see is some dialog here on the comments area about where you set the bar for membership and how you work with visitors in ways that supports your small group ministry, not drain it of its purposes.

Strategic Coaching

As a coach over groups in my local church, I spend a great deal of time thinking about and praying for the groups I oversee. I'm always asking the Lord what I might be able to do for the group to encourage it to keep reaching out to unchurched people and consider multiplying sooner than later.

Here's a few things I'm doing that seem to work well in my situation:

1. I pray with the leaders of the groups often, asking them to pray with me and ask God to bless them with a large group that will require a multiplication.

2. I encourage the group's core team (5-8 people who get together monthly to make plans with the leader) to meet consistently in a host home where a group might multiply, not in just one home. If people become familiar with a new host home, they're far more likely to be open to meeting as a new group in that home.

3. I ask the worship leader of the group to train someone to lead and share the worship time with them 50/50 until the group multiplies.

4. I ask the existing leader of the group to ask one of the core team members to facilitate the core team meetings in the future. This turns a core team member into a group leader naturally, and gives the leader a break.

5. I visit the group and ask them if they've achieve all God wanted them to achieve. I ask, "Are you done? Or, is there more to do as a group beyond loving one another, which you're already doing beautifully?" This forces them to think of God and others aside from themselves.

Coaching groups in this way is weak in American churches with small group ministries. The coaches make a phone call to check in with the leader once a month at best and they're typically given far too many groups to support.

I'd love to see what your church's coaches are doing that gives results (versus what you want them to do or they're supposed to be doing but not doing... which has a simple solution: modeling.)

Relational Evangelism

[I invested a few minutes this afternoon to peruse the topics I've blogged about recently to insure I didn't bore you, dear reader, with a a rehash of anything I might have shared previously. By doing this, it hit me like a ton of bricks... I've not shared my recent "aha!" moments about relational evangelism strategies! Wahoo! OK, it's not quite exciting enough for a "wahoo" but it did make me happy to know I had something new and enlightening to share with you today.]

For many years, I have encouraged my small groups to create and use a "blessing list." This is simply a large piece of paper taped to a wall in the room where we meet, on which is written our initials and the first name of an unchurched friend or relative who lives within an easy driving distance of our group meetings and member's homes.

[Note: I never call them "God's hit list" or "God's top ten most wanted" because words are powerful. We use "blessing list" because when one of the people on the list shows up to group meetings and sees a list with or without their name on it, I want them to know we are asking God to bless the people on the list, not label them in any way or make them feel like a target needing an arrow or bullet through it.]

Our blessing lists have been productive in keeping the names of our friends in our face each week so we can pray for them. However, it's ended there for the most part because the churches I've been involved in are not truly evangelistic nor relational, so asking members to be relationally evangelistic is exponentially more difficult.

This spring, we put up a new, clean blessing list on the wall and I decided to do it totally differently. Here's what we're doing now that's far more effective than anything we've done in the past...

Step One: Put the list on the wall and leave it blank for a couple of weeks. I asked the group members to break up into pairs of 2-3 and pray for God's name for the list, not the person we might put on the list from the top of our heads.

Step Two: I asked the group to break up into 2's and pray for themselves, asking God to give them his eyes and heart for whomever should be put on the list.

Step Three: Everyone put one name on the list, and as they wrote the name, they were to tell the group one very cool thing about their friend's character. I cautioned the group members NOT to tell the group why they needed Jesus so badly... ie, they are a wife beater, like to drink heavily, cuss like a sailor, or have a bad temper... these things are gossip and do nothing to make other members of the group want to get to know them.

Step Four: I asked the group members to share an interest, hobby, or area of expertise that the person on the list possesses. Then, we took time to discuss how we could "overlap" our lives with that person based on one or more of these things.

Step Five: We planned a picnic and invited everyone on the list. Two showed up, and that's a good start in my book. We'll do a lot more fun stuff to connect with folks on the list as a big group through the summer months.

Step Six: As the "outward captain" of my group, I am now visiting with each member to help them plan an activity or meeting with their friend from the list and someone from the group to cross-pollinate relationships between unchurched friends or relatives and group members.

Dave Earley, a wonderful author and pastor, wrote this in 8 Habits of Effective Small Group Leaders:

"First, win them as a friend. Then, win them to your group members as friends. And finally, you will win them to Christ."

Relational evangelism is something that Americans simply do not do naturally. One must take a small group of believers by the hand and walk them into it as a group and as individuals to prove to them that they have a personal mission in life and can and will be powerfully used by God to influence others to Christ.

What relational evangelism strategies are you using that move small group members into missional living? I'd love to hear about them to add to my arsenal :)

Quote for the day and Orphanage Video

I'm reading a little book published by Cell UK entitled Walking Together by Liz West and Trevor Withers. It's kind of a "what's a disciple" kind of book.

In the first chapter, Liz and Trevor make a brilliant distinction I wanted to share with you.

"Disciples are different from converts. A convert is someone who understands that Jesus is who he says he is and has accepted his or her need of him. In making that change in belief he or she has taken the momentous first step in the kingdom of God. But that is not where it ends. 'If I am going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ I need to take responsiblity for my own growth. I have to welcome this journey of change. I need to discover what I need to do and then take all courage and move forward.' "

That, my friends, is what we must help each person in our small groups understand. It's not enough to be a convert. We must pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps and become a disciple regardless of the ongoing challenges it will require. No one is going to spoon feed us or coddle us in our spiritual infancy. If we become mature in our faith, it's because we decided to do it ourselves and we will seek to include others in the journey who are also self-motivated ... (driving home the second point made in the book which explains the title.)

BTW, here's a direct link to the book if you're interested. It's not available in the US, but can be ordered from London...
Walking Together

On a totally separate note, I was finally able to find a video server to post the video of the orphanage director I met in Malawi. This pastor drives a taxi during the day and self-funds an orphanage of 149 children on $120 a month, believe it or not!



If Pastor Enoch's story moves you the way it moved me, you'll want to donate to his orphanage so he can feed 200+ more homeless, parentless children in the area of Malawi where his orphanage resides. You can do that through my non-profit organization and every dime will go to the orphanage, I assure you. Contact me at 713-884-8893 if you want more information on how to give toward this amazing man's ministry.