Small Group Ministry Roundup: Three Articles

5 Main Causes of “Failure to Thrive” in Small Group Ministry

Failure to thrive is a term used primarily in pediatric medicine “to indicate insufficient weight gain or inappropriate weight loss.”

Because I write so often about building a thriving small group ministry, failure to thrive seemed like a good term for a small group ministry that struggles or where growth is stunted or blocked. There is a short list of primary causes for a small group ministry that has a failure to thrive. Read more

A New Way to Develop Aligned Group Content: Smallgroup.com

Healthy groups don’t merely meet together; they form community built on the truth of God’s Word. In light of this, I shared some time ago about two wise approaches for group content: (1) a discipleship plan that systematically develops people or (2) aligned content that unites the weekly sermon with the group experience....

Today, I want to focus specifically on this second approach. Aligned content has a special ability to focus the whole church in a single direction. Churches that do this often have highly skilled pastors or staff members writing these studies each week. This is a time-consuming but worthwhile effort for these churches as every group discussion reinforces the vision, values, and mission of the church while taking the sermon to a more personal level. Read more

The church in which I am presently involved uses this approach. Each week a study guide is posted on the church's web site for small group hosts and participants and emailed to small group hosts who in turn email the guide to the participants in the small group that they are hosting.

Let Me Introduce You to Smallgroup.com

I love being a Sunday school teacher. At our church, we don’t have Sunday school classes divided by ages; instead, we rotate the focus of the classes about three times a year. Right now I am team-teaching a class walking through the parables of Jesus in the gospels, and it’s rich.

Every week.

Each week that I teach I get to stand in front of a room of thoughtful, faithful people who want to know God’s Word and follow it at an increasingly vigorous level. The conversation is always stimulating and more times than not, I walk out of that room feeling like I learned and was challenged more than anyone else in there. But being a Sunday school teacher is hard. It requires prayer and preparation, study on top of study. I want to know when I walk into that room that I’ve prepared and thought through not only the content itself, but the most engaging way to present that content in order to inspire good and reflective conversation that leads to real life change in someone.

Because it’s a hard job, I’m thankful to not only be able to use, but have worked to develop, a tool that has dramatically impacted the way I teach.

So today I want to introduce you to a website that the team I work on here at Lifeway has been working on very heavily for the last 9 months. Read more