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Don’t lead alone by Dick Whitton |
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As pastors, we take our role of shepherding the flock seriously. But as a church grows, it's impossible for a few staff members to oversee all the members' needs. Have you noticed that?
That's where small groups come in. Building a healthy small group network at your church means you will never have to lead alone. The key is finding and developing good leaders.
The role of small group leaders (or "hosts" as we call them) is to facilitate transformation. We want to facilitate for life change. It's not just about intellectual activity or notes in a notebook. It's about living out all five of God's purposes. It's not about a transfer of information; it's about transformation. It's about transforming lives.
At Saddleback, we believe that transformational leaders learn best on the job. We don't say "Jeff, we think you look like a good leader. Will you come to our six-month training class for leaders?" That discourages people from even getting started. We don't do that. Instead, we invite people who have never led to give it a try, and we make sure they have the right resources to succeed.
Here are eight tips for raising up new small group leaders at your church:
- Remove barriers to entry. If you ask people to "lead" or "shepherd," many people will think they aren't qualified and won't even try. But if you ask them to "host," they'll think, "I can do that." At Saddleback, we simply ask new HOSTs to:
- Have a heart for people.
- Open their home.
- Serve a snack and beverage.
- Turn on the DVD player.
- Have a clear training and development pathway. To ensure the long-term success of your small groups, the leaders need to stay one step ahead of group members. To do that, they need training and resources. I'll talk more about this later.
- Provide coaching for hosts. We call our coaches "community leaders." Every coach should know the next spiritual step of every host that they are responsible for. Where are they? Where are they going? What do they need to do? Have they been through Class 101 and 201, but not 301? Then that's their next step. It's the coach's job to say, "Hey, get there as soon as you can." The coach's job is to check in with hosts and provide encouragement.
- Teach hosts to be flexible as the group grows. Some hosts take it personally if someone leaves the group or if some members want to go off and start a new group. Teach them that it's healthy for groups to grow and change.
For example, we had a group of eight young married couples and half of the group wanted to do a Crown Financial study and the other half couldn't commit to all that homework once a week. So we split up for 12 weeks as they did the Crown study. One group did the financial study and we did a Bible study. Both groups came back with another couple each. You have to teach hosts to be flexible.
- Challenge hosts to share leadership responsibilities with group members. Teach hosts to rotate leadership and model delegation. I'll give you an example from my group. We were praying as a form of worship, but we had never done communion and we had never sung worship songs. So I asked Denise, who was part of our group, "Will you help us incorporate communion and singing?" She was happy to do that.
And by the way, there is a key here. Don't make a big deal out of it or put a title on it. If you ask someone to be the "worship champion" of their group, they're going to say, "I haven't been to seminary; I don't think I can do that." But if you ask, "Would you help me figure out how to do communion and maybe sing some songs?" they're more likely to do it.
Another example from my group is that we rotate houses. Whoever hosts provides dessert and leads the study for that night. And we don't have "purpose champions," but we have three ladies who handle the evangelism part for us. We call them PEACE representatives and they help us plan local and global projects.
- Offer opportunities that are developmentally appropriate for groups. Hosts need to know the threshold of risk of the people in their groups. They need to understand what the next appropriate growth steps are for the group. It's important to encourage risk-taking, but if a host pushes the group too far instead of leading incrementally, it can damage the group. Hosts need to build group members' faith step by step. So, teach hosts to start small and then ratchet it up, and offer opportunities for them to do so. The leader's job is to build people, not to lead a meeting, so through appropriate "crawl-walk-run" steps, they will build people up.
- Encourage sub-grouping to develop new leaders. This is really important. When the numbers go up, care goes down. If you have 16 people instead of eight people, everybody has half the time to share. You want to encourage personal interaction in your small groups. If a group has more than eight or more people, teach hosts to break the group into circles of three or four people for portions of the meeting time. Keep in mind that you want to sub-group because that helps you develop future hosts. And it may also connect people who will become a future group of their own.
- Teach hosts to be humble and authentic. Your small groups will never go deeper than the hosts are willing to go. And group members won't grow beyond the host's level of spiritual maturity. If a host is not growing in his or her own spiritual walk, it will hinder the group from growing. Invest time in your potential leaders. Teach them to pray consistently for their group. If there is one thing leaders can do, it's to pray, by name, for each member of their group prior to their small group meeting.
Training and resources for small group leaders
As I mentioned, it's important to have a clear training and development pathway for leaders. When the group gets started, the host will probably be one step ahead just by reading the lesson before the people get there. We teach just-in-time training because it takes all the pressure off. We don't only want seminary graduates leading small groups.
To help your hosts develop healthy groups, I want to point out two great resources. One of them is Don't Lead Alone, a six-CD set that gives an overview of each of the five purposes and explains the roles of "purpose champions" in small groups. So the person I have asked to be the worship leader, I would give the CD that goes with worship and so on. Once leaders get group members doing these things, it makes it a lot easier for them.
The other thing is 250 Great Ideas for Small Groups. There are 50 ideas on each one of the five purposes and how you can incorporate them in your small group. This is a great resource for making sure your small groups are healthy and balanced.
If our hosts complete the initial six-week commitment and want to continue hosting, we ask them to go to our Leader Training 1. This is one three-hour training program we offer two times each month. We give them an overview of what we're trying to accomplish in small groups, we tell about resources that they can receive, and that type of thing. We also assign them to a community leader as a coaching resource.
Then it's up to the community leader to do what we call Leader Training 2. Once hosts have been through that process, we feel they well equipped to lead.
Finally, once a year we get all of our small group hosts together and we bring in a nationally known speaker and we just love on them for a Saturday morning. It's just awesome to see thousands of people in our Worship Center see that what they are doing is a small part of a much bigger community.
Learn more about creating a small group network at your church at one of our conferences in 2009:
February 19-21 in Lake Forest, Calif.
March 26-28 in Houston
April 23-25 in Atlanta
May 14-16 in Cincinnati
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