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While many church leaders claim that small groups are an integral part of their ministry, I’ve learned that two simple measurements will always tell me their real place in a ministry’s pecking order: 1) the percentage of adults who attend a small group, and 2) the participation level of senior staff and key lay leaders.

Critical mass

By far the most important of these measures is the participation level of a church’s leaders. If they’re fully and visibly involved, the congregation usually follows. It’s the key to reaching critical mass – the all-important stage at which the full power and benefits of a small group ministry begin to impact the ethos, DNA, and spiritual health of nearly everything and everyone.

Getting there usually requires that somewhere between 40 to 60 percent of the average weekend adult attendance be involved in a small group. If fewer people participate, small groups will still have a profound effect, but it will be primarily on the individuals in them, not on the entire church.

That’s not to say small groups aren’t worth the effort if you can’t reach critical mass right away – or ever. They’ll still have great value in the lives of those involved. But their impact will never equal the revolutionary results that occur when small groups reach the level of a core ministry, or better yet the hub around which a ministry revolves.

At North Coast Church, small groups have been the hub for decades. But it wasn’t always so. In the beginning they weren’t even an important part of our ministry. For the first five years, the few small groups we had were decidedly peripheral. I wasn’t involved, and neither were any of our elders.

However, once we took the steps necessary to make them a genuine priority – by hiring a staff member to wake up thinking about small groups and by clarifying the expectation that all leaders would participate – the impact on the health and spiritual DNA of our church was profound and nearly immediate.

In fact, I was shocked by how quickly the culture of the entire church began to change. It’s a pattern I’ve since seen in church after church. It doesn’t matter if the groups are sermon based or not. Ours weren’t initially. All that matters is that a significant percentage of the congregation begins to meet in small gatherings outside the church building to share life and study the Bible together.

The Holy Man myth

One of the first things I noticed was the demise of a great falsehood that cripples our churches: the Holy Man myth.

It’s the idea that pastors and clergy somehow have a more direct line to God. It cripples a church because it overburdens pastors and underutilizes the gifts and anointing of everyone else. It mistakenly equates leadership gifts with superior spirituality.

Here’s how it impacted me. If someone in our church needed prayer, advice, or simply a visit in the hospital, I was the only one they wanted. If someone else showed up, apparently their prayers wouldn’t take and their advice wouldn’t work. And if I never made it to the hospital, the patient was sure to complain, “No one from the church ever visited me” – even though their friends (who were all from the church) stopped by daily.

I could never figure out how people’s seeming dependence on my prayers, advice, and physical presence squared with our stated belief in the priesthood of the believer – the New Testament doctrine that every follower of Christ has the privilege of direct access to God. It’s hardly a peripheral doctrine. It’s one that God himself emphasized when he ripped open the temple curtain that had, until Jesus’ death, separated the Holy of Holies from everyone but the high priest. This event symbolized the end of an era when a special holy man was needed to stand in the gap to mediate between God and man.

Small groups undercut this Holy Man myth because they typically meet in widely dispersed settings. This makes it impossible for the pastor (or any other staff member) to carry out all the pastoral roles and functions. They simply can’t be everywhere at once.

As a result, small group leaders inevitably step up and assume roles of spiritual leadership that they would have otherwise deferred to the pastoral staff.

That not only changes the way small group leaders view themselves; it changes the congregation’s outlook as well. Once people begin to realize that God’s anointing and spiritual power aren’t restricted to the guy who speaks each Sunday, they whine a lot less when he’s not available.

In the next issue we’ll look at the Holy Place myth and how small groups help people move past the myth onto the frontlines of ministry.

This article was excerpted from Sticky Church by Larry Osborne (Zondervan, 2008).

If you want to learn more about transforming your church through a small group network, join us at a Purpose Driven Small Groups conference in 2009:

• February 19-21 in Lake Forest, Calif.
• March 26-28 in Houston
• April 23-25 in Atlanta
• May 14-16 in Cincinnati