Pastors.com | Encouraging pastors and church leaders with tools for healthy, growing churches.

At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, there are two keys to a successful small group ministry – figuring out how to start a bunch of small groups and figuring out how to keep them going once you’ve got them started. At Saddleback we’ve been on a 10-year journey to find out how to do those two things better. In this article, I’ll share with you some of what we’ve learned on the first front.  

During the first six years of our small group ministry, we focused on starting more and more groups. During that time we made a commitment to become a church of small groups, not just a church with small groups. For us that meant all of our adult ministries – including men’s ministry, women’s ministry, couples’ ministry, deaf ministry, and so on – were done through small groups. Small groups aren’t just one of many adult ministries in the church, they are our adult ministry.

We also began experimenting with spiritual growth campaigns. We went through 50 Days of Faith and 50 Days of Love, where our weekend messages and small group curriculum ran on the same track. We used those campaigns to launch new groups, emphasizing that people needed to be in a group to get the full experience of the campaign. In four years we doubled the number of our small groups and had more than 5,000 people – or about 40 percent of our weekend attendance – in a small group. That was good, but not good enough.

We realized that we had created some self-imposed barriers to creating more small groups. It started with our language, what we called the group leaders. In the beginning we were calling them lay pastors. We had a really tough time getting more leaders at that point. We had a hard time finding people who felt qualified to be a lay pastor. Then we changed the name to “shepherd” and then “small group leader.” But many people didn’t see themselves as leaders, even though God did. They didn’t feel smart enough, and they didn’t think they had the time required to be a leader.

Then, in the fall of 2002, Pastor Rick challenged the small group team to start 3,000 new groups. It seemed like an impossible goal. But in the process, Pastor Rick also gave us a new strategy for getting leaders, a strategy that would forever change our small group ministry.

The H.O.S.T. Strategy removed the barriers that had previously limited our number of small groups. We started calling those who led groups "hosts." H.O.S.T.       stood for:

• Have a heart.
• Open your home.
• Serve a snack.
• Turn on the VCR or DVD player.

Small group hosts only had to do those four things – and be a church member or    be willing to become a church member. More than 3,000 small groups sprung up during that campaign, and 2,000 of them kept going even after the initial six-     week commitment.

Saddleback made four particular changes through the H.O.S.T. strategy that led to that growth.

1. We had a low barrier of entry for hosts. That started with the name change. We weren’t asking people to become leaders anymore. We were asking them to become hosts. That was something they could do. All they had to do was have a heart, open their home, serve a snack, and turn on their VCR or DVD player. Anyone could do that.

2. Our small groups had a limited duration. We weren’t asking people to sign up to be in a small group for the rest of their lives – just six weeks. People can do anything for six weeks. Once people got a taste of small group life, though, they wanted to continue. Even after you take into consideration    the small groups that ended after the campaign, the number of our groups nearly tripled.

3. Small group hosts didn’t need to know much about the Bible. We were able to lower our requirements for small group hosts without lowering our standards for the teaching that went on within the groups. With videotaped curriculum from Pastor Rick and our other teaching pastors, each of our groups were able to be doctrinally sound even if we didn’t have biblical experts as leaders.

4. We transitioned to just-in-time training. Instead of requiring our leaders to take a load of training before they started a group, we let them get training as they needed it, and we made it portable as well. We gave them enough training to get them started and then included leader tips within the DVD curriculum. Then we developed a training program that hosts were encouraged to take advantage of once their groups were up and going.

Once we started all of those new small groups, we realized that there was an expectation of care they had from the church. That was clearly a key to retaining small groups after the campaign. I’ll share about how Saddleback retained those small groups through a new care system we developed in a future article.