Treat your cell groups like precious bodies of Christ... because they are!

This week I was visiting with a pastor who had a grand plan to use some excellent materials to "bring my congregation up to speed with cell groups (he calls them small groups, but they're really cell groups in my book!) so I can get them all in a group this spring."


If you've ever learned how to make gravy, you know that it's a process that requires some patience and a solid understanding of food science. Stick with me on this because it will make lots of sense concerning the topic at hand when I'm done...


First, you begin with some hot grease or warmed butter in a pan. Then you sprinkle flour across the surface of the protein-laden grease and cook the pasty taste out of the flour.


Then, you take just a little warm milk or warmed broth of some sort and add it to the pan. When this happens, there's a chemical reaction and the now protein-laden flour reacts to the liquid and it lumps up when you stir it.


If you put in all the liquid at once, you get watery gravy with lumps in it. The secret is to put just a little liquid in and let the greasy cooked flour absorb it. Then add more and add more and add more and voila! you have a nice gravy that just needs some salt and pepper.


{sauce making lesson is now over}


The same thing holds true for your fledgling cell groups. Let's say you've worked hard to start healthy cell groups and you have three groups up and going and the members of those groups are being the church, not attending it. They're sharing their faith with unchurched friends and you're even seeing conversion growth in the groups.


You want everyone in the church to be in one of these groups! I get that.


The problem is that if you multiply these groups to 6 or even 12 groups and then flood them with traditionally minded or consumer minded church members, the groups will fail. The healthy DNA of the original groups could only handle a few members being introduced to keep the strain healthy.


In conclusion, let me say this to you pastors who want a transition to happen quickly: stop that! You'll mess up your gravy, I mean cell groups! They're precious and quite sensitive and relationships need to be cultivated carefully so you don't lose momentum.


Advice: Just invite a handful of faithful congregational believers who are dissatisfied with church as usual to become part of a group being prepared for group life. Challenge the groups you have to reach friends for Christ and start discipling them in the midst of their group relationships. Put one or two couples from your preparation group in each group when you think everyone is ready and see if they're absorbed properly.


Oh yeah... you gotta keep stirring. That applies to group members and leaders and making gravy!

Paradigm-shifting answers to common group questions

This blog entry doesn't need to be long to get an important point. If you ask the right questions, you get the right answers.

For example, don't ask, "How can we launch new groups this fall?" That's the wrong question if you've not already asked yourself and satisfactorily answered this one:

"How can we launch a culture of discipleship that will require a supportive small group structure?"

What are your "right" questions?

You can't manufacture growth and fellowship

I've joined a discipleship forum for a large denomination, even though I'm not in that denomination. They've graciously approved my membership and I'm enjoying what I am learning and contributing there. This morning, a pastor wrote this about his newfound experiences with holistic small groups in his latest church plant:

"I'm finding that as people build relationships, the small groups just seem to erupt on their own and are much more organic than planned. I'm looking for a way to sustain them, not control them, and allow them to develop mentors for other small groups. Maybe these groups will fare better with minimal centralized control with more relaxed leadership around the edges. I don't know, but I do know that I've stopped trying to manufacture growth and fellowship. It sounds sloppy (and it is) but it's closer to a cell-type structure than anything I've seen in a local church in a long time."

This really summarizes much of what I've been saying for a couple of years now. You can't manufacture growth and fellowship by launching a bunch of groups with untrained members and hastily trained leaders.

Untrained members?
Yes, you read that right. The first and greatest error made in small group ministry implementation is not selecting and then training future members of the first groups. The more missional the members, the easier it will be to lead them and the lower the bar must be for the group's leadership, including the coach and the staff pastor who undergirds their efforts to love God, love one another, and love the lost to Christ.

Right now I'm reworking a resource my father created twenty years ago called Life Basic Training. He created it for churches who desired to transition to groups. It's a "bootcamp" of sorts for incoming small group members, helping them examine their current values to see where they might conflict with God's values so they can be discarded.

Pastors who used it were surprised that everyone who started it did not complete it and then join a group. The material forced them to reconcile their beliefs and practices with God's Word and they were unwilling to die to their comfort, or personal agendas, or worldly practices to take up the cross and live as Christ commands.

The same pastors were also surprised at how well the groups did with people who had completed the pre-group process. Those groups could easily be described in the same was as the quote above. Low maintenance. Low control. High touch, and with a desire to leave and start a new group so more people could experience what they found in their small group.

Why more churches do not have a pre-group process in place for incoming members (from the ungrouped part of the congregation or from other churches when the person transfers in) is beyond me. Having no bar whatsoever (vs. setting it low or high) creates far more damage to the church, the groups, and the members than one can imagine.

I wrote about this whole issue in my book, but if you want to learn more about it feel free to contact my offices and we can talk about your church's situation and how to include a pre-group process to explain what healthy group membership requires and the benefits derived from it. I can be contacted at 713-884-8893.

Keep winning for Christ!
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How worship service to small group assimilation works in a healthy church

I was recently directed to an amazon.com review of my book with a concern about what I wrote in chapter two, dealing with the pastor's paradigm of small groups by employing a self-powered funnel strategy. The reviewer wrote:

"Neighbour contends that if a church desires to have small groups that are truly relational, then the groups must grow themselves through their own natural relationships. Neighbour would close the door from the worship service to small groups, and open it only from small groups to the worship service. While I agree with his premise, I find that he has swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. There has to be a middle way that combines using the worship service as a funnel to small groups, as well as promoting relational growth from within."

This is a solid assumption based on what I wrote, but comes from a traditional church paradigm and doesn't take into account what I did not include. If the reviewer had been a part of a group-driven church, he would have seen the beautiful dovetailing that large venue outreach can provide the small groups.

An excellent case study example would be LifeChurch in Katy, Texas. Lee Brockington is the lead pastor of this group-driven, Christ-centered church, and LifeChurch has a nice big facility that draws in folks from all over who have no relational connection to any group member.

Each week before his sermon, he shares a variation of this statement: "If you are visiting today and want to get plugged in here at Lifechurch and see if this is a place you want to make as your church home, accept one of the many invitations you've already received to visit and then join a lifecell. If you're only coming to these Sunday services, you are still on the outside, watching small groups of believers gather for celebration."

Take note of two things:

a. New families visit this church every week, but LifeChurch leadership doesn't launch new groups to keep these visitors coming back to the services. This is the heart of the chapter—the congregational service is about the groups coming together for celebration and for outsiders to see what group life is all about and get involved.

b. LifeChurch's assimilation process is organic and relational. Because the first groups were formed through relational connections with unchurched people and maintain this as a part of their healthy DNA, reaching out to visitors is something the members of the group do naturally. Plus, when the groups grow large with new folks invited from the congregation, they excitedly multiply the group considering it a sign of great success, not a divorce!

A few months ago, Lee told me a story about a woman who called the church office mid-week to visit with him on the phone. She said, "I need to let you know something that really bugs me about your church. Every week I get numerous invitations to visit a lifecell or go to lunch with a bunch of lifecell members from a group ... and I'm tired of it! Why don't you tell your people to back off?"

Holding back his laughter, Lee informed her they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, and that while she might not understand it, he was very proud of them. He encouraged her to visit a lifecell and get involved and not just attend the Sunday services. He reiterated that LifeChurch is not the typical "go to church on Sunday" kind of church which she could easily find by the dozen within a five mile radius (inferring that if that's what she was shopping for, she could easily find it).

So to bottom-line it for the reviewer and anyone else who thinks I am not pro-worship service for the sake of attracting those new to a community, let me summarize...

In a healthy small group-driven church, there is indeed a "middle way" to bring weekend service visitors into group life, but it requires healthy group members who understand the power of biblical community and want to bring as many into it as possible. When groups are hastily formed by leadership to be the sticky part that keeps people coming back to the services week after week, the motivation will produce anemia in the small groups formed for this reason and for this purpose.

The largest churches in the world are group-driven and have hundreds of first-timers come through the doors every Sunday. New folks are assimilated into an existing healthy small group filled with members who understand that small group isn't a meeting or something done to keep people in a church. The difference is that these churches see the small groups as being the main and missional thrust of the church and the big gathering as an important part of keeping the main thing strong and pointed in the right direction.

New groups for new members?

This morning I received an excellent question from a pastor reading my book. He asked:

"I've started reading your book and have a question. What is the best way to integrate new comers into the small groups, either starting a new one or into existing ones?"

I believe the best way to think about a long-term solution to this challenge is to take a much larger snapshot of where the growth is coming from in a church:

Organic growth = small group members inviting friends and neighbors to church services and small group meetings.

Attractional, program-driven growth = advertisements and marketing campaigns attracting total strangers to come inside.

I firmly believe there will be enfolding issues with existing small groups if that basic Christian community itself is not outwardly focused and growing the church numerically through relationships. With this in mind, any small group-driven church who is serious about organic growth should work very hard to train members to be outreach oriented through discipleship while simultaneously decreasing the traditional "attractional" methods used to grow the church.

Now the proximity of some church buildings near a freeway or simply being well known in a community is going to attract total strangers to the building when the small groups gather for weekend services, which should be addressed organically vs. programmatically.

Some churches work overtime to train their small group members (not just the leaders) to reach out to visitors, buy them lunch after the service, hang out with them, become a genuine friend, and bring them into their small group. Visitors and new members are organically invited into existing biblical communities (small groups).

Other churches ask three to four people from existing groups to form new groups with new members by being a part of the new member class or orientation process, which is an enfolding or assimilation strategy. This second method seems to work very well where small groups have been in place for many years and asking 3-4 mature members to form a new group with new members breaks up the hard soil.

The bottom line is that to remain or become highly relational and grow organically, the cultivation and development of new members in new groups must be done by members of groups, not the church staff or with a program. This is not easy to get your head around until you start doing it, but it does work in the world-class small group-driven churches I researched for the content of the book.
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Base Camp and Boot Camp. What's the difference?

In my book I describe the discipleship journey as a hike up a mountain with a mentor or guide. For the new believer, that hike begins with a spiritual formation event that serves as the "base camp" visit for the mountain climbing the person will be doing to educate them as to what lies ahead.

Boot Camp is totally different. This is what a church puts in place to assimilate the congregation into groups when new groups are formed and have openings. Boot Camp material deals with values and what community is all about and that there's no place to sit and soak or just study the Bible and not apply it. It must be more than a weekend or single class. The process of boot camp must bring sit-and-soak consumer Christians to a full understanding of the life of a kingdom activist and help them begin to walk it out.

Then, when they join a group and go to the base camp (spiritual formation) they will desire to do the mountain climbing with a mentor or guide. If you just flood your new groups with congregational members, they'll quickly dilute the power of that community to reach up, reach in, and reach out because the new people only possess a theory or head knowledge about what those living in healthy biblical community do.

I hope this helps!

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.