| How you can have small group success at your church |
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The secret weapon for recruiting new leaders in any church is and always will be the senior pastor. The key? Alignment. You see, if you offer small group material that coincided with your senior pastor's weekend teachings, you will double your small groups. In fact, your senior pastor can even lead the small groups. Sound impossible? Let us explain how it can work for you.
It started with Pastor Rick Warren agreeing to videotape himself teaching a Bible study on the book of James. The congregation loved it! Finally, ordinary church members could take these tapes and have all they needed to lead Bible studies in their homes. They didn’t have to be Bible scholars; they didn’t even have to teach. Rick did it all for them.
This concept of alignment worked great, but we still had only 50 percent of the average weekend attendance connected in a group. There were still 8,000 to 12,000 people to go before we felt like we were fulfilling what God had called us to do – connect the entire congregation under the care of a shepherd.
Then a new idea came to us on the eve of a 40 Days campaign. We decided to invite people to host a group rather than lead a group. That may seem like a matter of semantics, but it proved to be a phenomenal concept for rapidly growing our groups.
With the new video curriculum we were able to simply say, “If you have a VCR, you can be a star.” Anyone can host a group like this, and they did. More than 3,000 people agreed to open their homes for six to eight weeks. We were overjoyed and overwhelmed at the same time. Were these people Christians? If so, how long had they been believers? Had any of them ever been in a small group before? Had they even attended our church?
Glen Kruen, Saddleback’s executive pastor, and Tom Holladay, Saddleback’s teaching pastor, helped create a survey for these folks, and the results were astonishing. The survey indicated that, on average, those who had agreed to host a small group were indeed Christians and had been for 14 years or more. They had attended Saddleback for 10 years or more and had most likely attended a small group before. We’d say they were ready to host a video-led study and pose some questions for discussion. When all the dust had settled, our team trained more than 2,000 new hosts and launched another 2,300 groups with more than 20,000 people going through a six-week study on The Purpose Driven Life.
Before you say that these results are geared for a mega-church, let us tell you that we’ve had the opportunity to walk with literally hundreds of churches of various sizes and denominations that have duplicated these results. Pastor Guillermo Velasquez from House of Faith in Miami launched 40 groups in a congregation of 200 adults during their recent 40 Days campaign. Not only did the groups fill up, but the church filled up too. By the end of their campaign, their church grew from 200 adults to 350 adults and went to multiple services, including a bilingual service. Here’s how you can reap the same kind of small group success:
By following these simple steps, your 40 Days campaign can go well beyond all that you ask or imagine. It worked at Saddleback Church. It worked at Pastor Guillermo’s church. It can work at your church.
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