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I have over 800 friends on Facebook and about the same number of Twitter followers. I have additional acquaintances on Plaxo and LinkedIn, not to mention all my Outlook contacts. I can access the New York Times, CNN, and almost every version of the Bible on my Blackberry or laptop in seconds. I have instant access to incredible amounts of information and literally thousands of people. Yet sometimes I wonder if I’m any more connected or better informed than I was before all this accessibility.

We can have a false sense of community because we have contact with so many people, but often have no real connections. We can have loads of information at our fingertips, but rarely interact with it in a way that makes a difference or results in life-change.

Jesus offers a solution to this kind of technological isolation. One day a man asked Jesus, “What is the most important commandment?” In Jesus’ day, people had taken the Bible and boiled it down to 613 commandments. So the guy is saying, “Help me out here, cut through this information overload and just tell me which is the most important commandment? He was asking Jesus, “What’s the big idea?”

Jesus responds by saying the most important one is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” In the same breath he says, “And the second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. No commandment is more important than these.”

Why did Jesus give the two most important commands and not just the one? He adds this second thing so that we don’t fall into a “just Jesus and me” kind of spirituality that can lead to isolation. When Jesus says to love other people with the same kind of focus and energy that you love yourself, he is echoing God’s original dream in Genesis. Jesus doesn’t say love your neighbor as yourself because that’s what nice and good – what Christian people should do. It’s because it’s how we are hard-wired to live. It’s what it means to be a Christ-follower.

God’s “big idea” and small groups – a life-changing combination

At Community Christian Church, experiencing biblical community through small groups is our antidote to technological isolation. Lyman Coleman, a pioneer in the contemporary small group movement, influenced the development of small groups at Community. Lyman advocated an idea he called “Pulpit Groups” – small groups that based their discussions on the previous weekend’s sermon. Lyman was convinced this approach had several benefits:

1. A person with minimal Bible knowledge could lead a small group.
2. It would result in greater life transformation.
3. It would thematically tie the weekend celebration service to the weekly small group experience.

We call these small groups “Big Idea Groups,” and we’ve discovered a number of benefits in tying the discussions in our small groups to the weekend celebration service theme:

• They increase life change.

Giving people a chance to gather with others on a similar spiritual journey to interact on the content of our weekend celebration services increases the likelihood of life application. Even the most dynamic and interactive celebration services tend to be primarily a didactic experience: we talk, we sing, we dance – and they listen and watch. Small groups are experiential and discussion-oriented by nature. As a result, they are more likely to foster life change.

• They diminish people’s fears of leading a small group.

One of the greatest challenges in launching new groups is recruiting small group leaders. We’ve found that the most common fears among potential small group leaders are:

“I don’t know enough about the Bible.”
“I don’t have enough time to be a good leader.”
“I’ve never thought of myself as a leader.”

Prior to the launch of every “Big Idea” series, we develop and publish a small group discussion guide with lessons that parallel each topic/week in that series. Making these guides available to our leaders significantly reduces their insecurities regarding leading.

• They eliminate the problem of: “What do we study next?”

Small groups tend to get overly focused on finding topics for their discussions, often at the expense of developing relationships and experiencing genuine biblical community. The relational small group experience can easily slip into more of a teacher/student context. Recently a small group leader spent hours researching possible topics for future study. On the evening he presented his ideas, someone in the group brought a new book he had been reading, and in a matter of minutes hijacked the conversation and persuaded members to “vote” for his suggestion, forgetting the leader’s research. Following the weekend series minimizes this challenge and offers small groups an easy plan to follow.

• They increase the quality of small groups.

Small groups are a risk! They are a low-control venture and a decentralized way to pastor and care for people. We want to do whatever we can to make our leaders as successful as possible. With the proliferation of small group discussion guides (both good and bad), and an array of other variables, the quality of any given small group experience is uncertain. Even with well-trained small group leaders, a group can easily be derailed by choosing content that is less than stimulating or by selecting a discussion guide that does not foster life-changing conversations. While there are many things that contribute to a great small group experience, using our “Big Idea” guides increases the likelihood of a group having an outstanding small group experience.

We’ve found the “Big Idea” to be a tremendous asset in helping our small groups become places of real community and life change, and not simply places to gather more information.