9
The Dining Room

SUSTAINING LONG-TERM SUCCESS IN SMALL GROUPS

Q17	—	How Will You Ensure Your Ministry’s Long-Term Success?
Q18	—	How Will You Celebrate Stories of Life Change to Reach Your Vision?
Q19	—	Fow Will You Remain True to Your Call?
Q20	—	How Will You Help Your Groups Cultivate an Attitude of Worshipful Submission?

Now what? What do you do once your small group ministry is up and running? How do you sustain your ministry in a way that continually challenges you and your members? How, in the growth and retention cycles of church life, do you keep your vision and mission central? How do you make sure your compass is set and you stay on course through the storms?

Starting small groups is one task. Sustaining and building them for health is yet another, and in some ways trickier. You can’t microwave a small group ministry. If God wants to grow a mushroom, he does it in six hours. If God wants to grow an oak tree, he does it in sixty years. If you want a small group ministry like a mushroom, soft and easily destroyed, grow it quickly. If you’d rather have a ministry like an oak tree—with deep roots, strength, and longevity—it will take more time. We’ve been refining our small group ministry for twenty years. Sometimes it feels like 120 years, and sometimes it feels like twenty minutes. It takes time to do it right! Pray for the people working with you. Pray that you will plan your goals with wise intentionality. And if your goals don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough. Pray for perseverance as you labor to accomplish those scary goals. Then let God move you!

For example, Chris McCall, small groups and care pastor at Watermark Church, Ashford, Alabama, explains in a recent note how his church added leader coaching and support as a way of sustaining long-term success:

Our small groups ministry seemed to be OK, but something was missing. Our small groups had become stagnant, and we were losing almost the same number of groups we were starting. Our leaders were not getting the span of care they so desperately needed. We had tried a coaching structure on numerous occasions, but it typically died a quick, painful death because we had made it about the structure, not the people. After many discussions I knew we needed another go at coaching with a different tactic.

I enlisted some great group leaders that were very relational and were on board with small groups. These became our small groups leadership team and our first generation of community leaders. Our crawl phase was to spend time vision casting, training, and building on our relationships. During the walk phase we placed the community leaders over group leaders with whom they already had relationships. Last, we launched the run phase by placing unfamiliar group leaders under their care. This has already created a great deal of momentum in our ministry. We are now adding more groups than we’re losing, and next semester we will begin adding the second generation of community leaders.

This is the goal. A healthy, strong, growing small group ministry that is sustained through the changing experiences of life.

Q17

How Will You Ensure Your Ministry’s Long-Term Success?

Did you know that NASA schedules course corrections at various times during a rocket’s flight? Modern space travel succeeds by periodically checking their trajectory and making any necessary adjustments to successfully reach the destination.

Much like NASA, we need to make small corrections along our journey. Some corrections help bring the ministry back on plan after it has drifted. This keeps you following your plotted course.

But sometimes you may realize that the plan itself needs to be revised because experience shows the original plan to be inadequate or that you’ve outgrown it. This is a natural part of ministry, because you can’t know everything when you first launch out. A plan that needs to be changed is not a failure, and you don’t need to feel guilty unless you fail to update a plan that isn’t working. Every church is different, so developing your small group ministry is an expedition into uncharted waters. It’s common to experience what feel like setbacks to our plans. “Setbacks” are often, in actuality, the unveiling of God’s plans and the opening of doors we never knew existed. When this happens, take the new insight as a gift from God to bring you closer to the plan he had all along.

Your small group ministry will not course correct by itself. Ministry corrections are needed all the time. You can’t take a bunch of imperfect people and create a perfect small group ministry or church. Sometimes the called-for adjustments seem impossible, and they are often frustrating. It’s hard to stay the course. What will keep you motivated? Your vision and mission! Your dream and your purpose! Be willing to make constant course corrections in your plan and ultimately grow your ministry into what God means it to be.

Define Success, Stay Aligned

Your church vision and mission define success for your church. Because of this, you need to keep your ministry aligned with your church, its temple courts, and all of its other ministries. If each part doesn’t understand the roles the others play, or if one part is out of sync, everyone falls out of sync. Keep building relational capital with the rest of your church’s leadership and other ministries. Do what you can to foster interconnected cooperation in which each part helps the others work together to maximize your church’s kingdom achievement.

The vision and mission of your small group ministry will define that ministry’s contribution to your church’s success. This is your strong foundation on which you will build. If you ever toss the blueprints and freestyle it, you are going to end up with a mess. It’s important to stay the course and work your plan, all the while allowing room for adjustments, both yours and God’s. As your ministry grows, you will sometimes have to evaluate whether your blueprints permit the ministry equivalent of an extra living room or bigger kitchen. But overall, you must stay aligned with your original vision and mission.

Here are a few ways to detect needed adjustments or to confirm that you’re on course:

• Schedule regular evaluations, especially with your C Team. Ask, “Are we on course, or do we need to adjust course to get back on plan?” And ask the harder question, “Do we need to revise the plan?” Keep applying a critical eye both to where you are and to where you want to go.
• Use surveys, questionnaires, and other data sources to measure intended outcomes. Too many can exhaust leaders, so we use no more than three or four surveys a year to monitor the effectiveness of tools we offer, group health, and overall satisfaction.
• Interview randomly selected small group members and leaders to get glimpses into the state of group life. You yourself should do some of this because it’s appropriate for the shepherd (pastor) to mingle with the sheep.
• Consider conducting exit interviews or surveys of members who’ve left groups or leaders who’ve stepped out of leadership. Sometimes their reasons for leaving are unrelated to the ministry’s effectiveness, but sometimes you’ll receive helpful feedback for adjustments.
• Ask other ministries in the church how you are doing at partnering with them and together helping people become more like Christ.

You may not always know how to address problems that come to light. Consider gaining fresh outside perspective from new sources beyond your leadership team—trusted friends, leaders from other churches, other leaders in your church, and of course your senior pastor.

When you implement change, always do it with relationships in mind. You want to build relationships with the people the change is affecting. You are serving the Lord and people, not just accomplishing tasks. And always overcommunicate. People will be down on whatever they are not up on.

Guard against Drift

Figure 9.1

It’s not uncommon for someone to become complacent after a long time in any ministry. The heart shown in figure 9.1 represents Saddleback’s definition of the mature disciple, and it reminds us of our target when we lose perspective. Your church should keep in mind the kind of person you are hoping to produce (see Q5). The large arrow is the overall vision and mission of your church. The smaller arrows within the larger arrow are the direction your church’s ministries are headed. Therefore, each ministry within your church should be nurturing people toward this goal. Unfortunately, you may find yourself in a place of conflict, where some ministries are a little off and others may actually be working against the intended end of developing complete disciples for your church. Do your best to work together toward unity and fresh clarity of purpose.

Any time you’re leading others toward a goal, follow-up is key. It’s a mistake to issue an instruction without checking back to make sure it was carried out.

Understand the Levels of Renewal

Renewal in your small group ministry starts with you! God has you at your church to build the house-to-house component talked about in the book of Acts. In order to enact the frequent “upgrades” required to keep your ministry on course, you need to understand and implement the five levels of renewal:

1. Personal renewal. For you, the point person for your small group ministry, this begins with confession. This is renewal of your vertical connection with God, which must happen before anything else. Your soul is cleansed, recharged, and open for God’s marching orders. This is where God can build your passion and conviction to stoke your ministry’s fire. You are the conscience of the small group ministry. You give it direction and momentum. If the enemy gets you off task, he has won. You should also ensure that personal renewal is reduplicated throughout your ministry leadership.
2. Relational renewal. The church economy deals in the currency of relationships, and relationships deepen as people spend time together and come to know each other better. As the ministry point person, you need to build your relational currency with all of your leadership. As a member of your church’s leadership, you must build relational currency with other leaders and ministries. Do all you can to foster relational depth through all parts of your ministry, in every direction, among all participants.
3. Missional renewal. This is where you help all the people understand your purpose, why your small group ministry exists. You fire up your veterans and ministry champions (early adopters), allow fence sitters (mid-adopters) space to understand, and give the resistant (late adopters) a vantage point to see the value of your ministry’s purpose. Missional renewal is never finished; it’s an ongoing process that varies in intensity.
4. Structural renewal. As your ministry grows, its original structure will not survive, because it shouldn’t. A ministry of fifty small groups can’t thrive in the same structure that served well for five groups. Be prepared to change the way you handle administration, communication, training, budgeting, and other aspects of programming.
5. Cultural renewal. Understand that drift always happens, and once-aligned ministries can become misaligned. There is a spiritual parallel with the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the total entropy of the universe is constantly increasing toward disorder, never decreasing toward order. People are people, and our fallen nature takes over. In cultural renewal, your mission and vision stoke the fire and bring all teams and departments back on course. All parts come to understand how they fit in the Acts 5:42 temple courts and house-to-house strategy, and all do their parts to champion each other.

Many pastors and ministry leaders make a common mistake. They may be working hard at the level of personal renewal, and maybe everyone under their leadership is doing the same. That’s good. Then they attend a conference or read a book about how to do church or small group ministry, and they go straight to structural renewal, trying to change everything. They skip over the intervening levels of renewal. They may envision a wonderful structure, but since they’ve skipped over renewal of relationships, mission, and culture, no one else sees the reason or feels the motivation to adopt the new structure. The whole population must move along together through all five stages, and structure will not lead but rather will flow from the rest.

Sustaining your ministry is all about the long game and bringing people along with you!

After you’ve completed this page, mark the highest-priority action for this planning question.

Please see pages 86–89, “Instructions for Question Planning Pages,” for how to fill this out.

Copy that action onto the prioritizing list, pages 221–23 in chapter 10.

Q18

How Will You Celebrate Stories of Life Change to Reach Your Vision?

Another important part of the sustaining phase is celebrating and learning from the life journeys of the people in your small groups. The Bible says, “Since we are receiving a Kingdom that is unshakable, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe” (Heb. 12:28 NLT). Absorb that for a minute. An unshakable kingdom. If we have any cause for celebration, that is it. Make time throughout your small groups to worship God by celebrating what he is doing. You and others can share stories and life lessons powerfully through written and spoken word.

Stories are powerful motivators. Jesus was a master of using stories. Be creative in using stories to help small group leaders and members parlay your vision into action.

In Groups

Our regular celebration of what God is doing helps keep group leaders and members excited about the ministry and their part in it. We’re all motivated by true stories about the supernatural God of this universe intersecting with our lives. When he demonstrates his infinite power and love, all we can say is, Wow! Just wow, God!

First remind leaders and members to stay aware, noticing what God is doing around them. If he isn’t doing anything, they need to pray in confidence that he will amaze us. Encourage groups to write down their requests and God’s responses.

Then when God responds, ask them to share the stories in their groups and, through the leaders, with you or your team. One great way to do this is making a group video (using someone’s phone) to tell the story. Highlight the most relevant members as the stars, but also draw in the rest of the group and their thoughts. Ask leaders to send these videos to you or a designated assistant, who can evaluate them and edit for quality. Then post the videos to social media and your website, or catalog them for use by teaching pastors and as testimonies in services.

Stories of God’s intervention in groups and individual lives will take your ministry to a new level. Guaranteed.

You can also request stories from specific group members and leaders. Guide their mental processing about the ways small group involvement has impacted their lives. What has caused them to follow Christ in new ways? What brought about changes in attitude and behavior?

I recommend you establish a system for gathering and archiving stories. You may hear a powerful testimony that you don’t need now, but you may need it in a month or a year.

Continual Learning

I’ve successfully used the “Four Ps of Continual Learning” as a guide for sharing in groups, and it often draws out stories about God’s unshakable kingdom in our lives. You may have seen the Four Ps in my previous books, and I’ve recently added a fifth. This is a tool you can pass along to your small group leaders and members to help them share their stories with each other.

What Is a Praise?

Something good is always going on. We find it easy and natural to complain about what’s going wrong, but God wants us to see the glass half full. In small groups, share with each other what’s going right, or what good is coming out of our circumstances—even our difficulties.

What Is a Problem?

Encourage group leaders and members to view and share problems as opportunities to learn. I guarantee that every problem is something someone else has encountered—possibly someone in the same group, possibly someone we can learn about in the Bible. Encourage your people to look around; they may connect with someone who has the solution or life lessons to draw from the problem.

What Is the Plan?

When your leaders and members share with each other about their hopes, they have greater experience and wisdom together to come up with plans for achieving those hopes. At Saddleback we guide small groups to work on balanced fulfillment of Jesus’s Great Commission and great commandment in each other’s lives. Some people’s stories will illustrate ways this has happened in their past. These encourage others to write and live God’s stories for their future.

What Is a Personal Prayer Request?

Group members can invite each other’s prayers, asking our Father to help us live well the next step of our stories. We can also pray for each other’s friends and family, as well as spiritual leaders, government officials, and more.

What Is Healthy Perspective?

Pray for and look for God’s perspective on your life and your group experience. He has revealed much about his perspective through Scripture. When we rise above our usual limited horizons and gain his viewpoint, we find new reason to celebrate what he is doing and how our life and group circumstances are achieving his great plan. Our stories are all part of God’s greater Story. Our lives are the global, history-spanning telling of his Story.

After you’ve completed this page, mark the highest-priority action for this planning question.

Please see pages 86–89, “Instructions for Question Planning Pages,” for how to fill this out.

Copy that action onto the prioritizing list, pages 221–23 in chapter 10.

Q19

How Will You Remain True to Your Call?

As you do everything it takes to sustain and grow your small group ministry, don’t get so caught up in the tasks that you forget your calling.

After his resurrection, Jesus asked Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15). Three times Jesus asked, and three times Peter answered yes. What does Jesus mean by “these”? I think he was talking about 153 fish the disciples had just caught, on which they had just breakfasted. This may seem inconsequential, but every detail in Scripture is meaningful. For a first-century fisherman, a catch of 153 fish was striking the mother lode. It was a great boost for the livelihood of Peter and his family. Jesus wanted Peter to remember his calling, that Peter had initially trusted Jesus enough to leave “these” and follow him.

Before any of us can lead a ministry, we must be able to answer Jesus’s question: “Do you love me more than these?” What does “these” mean to you? For me, it is security. Insecurity almost kept me from getting into ministry. Insecurity kills faith! For Peter it was livelihood. Peter ultimately wrestled down this temptation and willingly kept following Jesus as his highest life priority. The next time we see Peter, three thousand people are saved through his preaching!

If you are going to fulfill God’s purpose for you in your church and your small group ministry, you can’t forget your calling. Your ministry’s long-term success is made more likely by your own longevity in your church overseeing that ministry. The longer you are able to share and enact your vision, the better your chances for permanently changing your church culture.

But if you are weary or overburdened, or even slightly unsettled, that may make it difficult for you to feed Jesus’s sheep (see John 21:15–17). The devil works in sneaky ways. If he can’t cause you to sin, he will do his best to keep you busy and distracted. Don’t become so consumed with a checklist that you forget the real economy of your church and ministry: people! Keep your guardrails in place, balancing processes and people. Capitalize on prayer partners and mentors. Don’t drift from your priorities, including your priorities outside your ministry—your family, for example. God has given you a mission, and he will help you complete it!

It is imperative that you take care of your own soul. If you have trouble justifying the pursuit of biblical rest and restoration, you need no more excuse than the fact that your kingdom assignment depends on it. If you burn out, your ministry may burn out as well. If you aren’t caring for your soul, you are more prone to becoming sidetracked.

Daniel Thomas at Highlands Fellowship Church in Abingdon, Virginia, wrote me a note about this very issue:

My personality isn’t one where I can simply turn off work mode. I found myself becoming frustrated and even exhausted with “the ministry.” When I attended your conference, you challenged me to consider soul care and being true to my call to serve the local church. If I don’t plan to stay true to my call, I can’t be effective in serving others. Not only will I suffer, but so will those God has entrusted to my care. As will the evangelism that my small groups are doing.

So I’ve developed a simple plan:

1. Schedule daily time with God in my calendar—This feeds my soul, and brings success in my ministry, because everything I do stems from my personal relationship with God.
2. Connect with a mentor regularly—When my mentor knows my plan, he or she can help me stay on track.
3. Connect with other small group point people or pastors either online or in person once a quarter (through the Small Group Network)—I love learning from others with ministry experience, as well as gaining fresh insight from those who are new. This also helps renew my passion.
4. Invest in others, share with someone what God is sharing with me—I believe God only gives to us as we pour ourselves into others.

In all the areas of growth and faithfulness you teach in your ministry—time with God, giving, fellowship with other Christians, and so on—you must see to these in your own life. Otherwise your ministry effectiveness will erode. The Casting Crowns song “Slow Fade” talks about how we can slide backward by small degrees. Nobody digs a spiritual hole with a backhoe, but typically one teaspoon at a time.

Of course all of the leaders in your ministry should be doing the same in order to ensure their effectiveness in their roles. But they are following your lead, so I’m purposefully directing this question toward you personally. Daily renew your passion rather than allowing your ministry to become a drudgery or burden. God wants your service to manifest the gifts he has given you, to win and draw people close to his Son, Jesus. What renews your soul? As the shepherd goes, so go the sheep.

After you’ve completed this page, mark the highest-priority action for this planning question.

Please see pages 86–89, “Instructions for Question Planning Pages,” for how to fill this out.

Copy that action onto the prioritizing list, pages 221–23 in chapter 10.

Q20

How Will You Help Your Groups Cultivate an Attitude of Worshipful Submission?

For this question I want to expand on the traditional definition of worship. Here it means complete submission to the Holy Spirit, total surrender, including sacrifice of the junk that is in us. The small group point person is the starting point for worshipful submission throughout the ministry. Our example trickles down through our leadership, so our personal submission and surrender to the Lord is a critical factor to everyone we lead. We must continually put ourselves on the altar as living sacrifices (see Rom. 12:1), knowing that God wields the knife as a surgeon, not an assassin. The following habits have kept me going for thirty-five years in ministry:

• Quiet time. Whatever it takes, I make it happen. I am a terrible reader, so I use audio via the Drivetime Devotions app. Ten minutes of Scripture sets the table for me to reflect with the Lord. Spend time with God to be used by him.
• Tithing and time. When God owns your finances, he owns you. When God owns your calendar, he owns you. Giving is worship.
• Community. Authentic human relationships—especially with those who love you in ways that improve you—make you more Christlike.

Worship helps you and your leaders connect the ministry dots so everyone “gets it.” Helping all your leadership connect with God will do more than a hundred times as much as training. So in sustaining your ministry, keep yourself and your leaders in close touch with your best advocate, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit held first-century churches together throughout all the chaos and turmoil, and he will do the same for yours. You may think you control your ministry, but it is his ministry, and he controls it. Plan for and expect meaningful experiences that allow God to do what only he can do, and it will make your job a lot easier!

At Saddleback we emphasize worship largely in three contexts within our small group ministry.

In Small Groups

Train your leaders to plan small group worship with care so it doesn’t seem like a waste of time but rather an integral part of group members’ spiritual health. When God commanded us to observe a Sabbath as part of submissive worship, he certainly didn’t consider that a waste of time. We fear that taking a day off from work will put us behind. But God can do more with six days than we can do with seven. All other time devoted purely to God is equally meaningful and will renew us in ways we never thought possible. I myself struggle to believe this. But if I worked and rested my way, instead of God’s way, I’d trash my marriage, my kids, even my ministry.

We encourage small groups to enjoy worship in numerous ways, both in group meetings and in members’ lives seven days per week. Some groups may celebrate the Lord’s Supper, delving deep into related Scriptures and prayer, so that members aren’t limited to the brief experience in weekend services. Some groups also use:

• Scripture meditation. Someone reads a Scripture passage, then members silently dwell on the meaning and application of the teaching before sharing how it spoke to them.
• Video. The large selection of worship on video provides many options to play before or in response to Bible study.
• Singing. If your group has the talent, go for it. (If my small group sang, that would be our last meeting and the video would go viral!)
• Communion. This is powerful if your church polity allows it.

The ideas are countless. These are just suggestions to get the ball rolling.1

In Community Huddles

In some of our Community Huddles we gather a cluster of small group leaders (though anyone is welcome, and sometimes whole groups attend), not just to meet with each other, but also to meet with God. Sometimes God shows up in cool and varied ways. We may structure a Community Huddle this way:

• 30 percent training on God’s Word and leading small groups
• 40 percent role-play related to the training, creating real or simulated experiences for people (as when our leaders recently practiced anointing with oil during training)
• 30 percent personal and heart, guiding leaders in meaningful corporate worship

In Leader Gatherings

As I’ve described earlier, we offer our Leader Gatherings twice per year, once to express appreciation, cast vision, and recruit, and another time for a night of worship. We keep it simple but effective. Not only do leaders enjoy a time of meaningful worship, but they also learn ways of leading their small groups in worship.

After you’ve completed this page, mark the highest-priority action for this planning question.

Please see pages 86–89, “Instructions for Question Planning Pages,” for how to fill this out.

Copy that action onto the prioritizing list, pages 221–23 in chapter 10.