Small Groups: Fellowship Is a Verb

In early 2000, our leadership team began asking the question: What does a healthy follower of Christ look like? If we are to be successful in fulfilling Christ’s commission to make disciples, we need to define the term “disciple.” Through a series of meetings, we determined that a healthy follower of Christ is someone who is balancing the five biblical purposes in his or her life and heart.

A healthy follower of Christ is:

• Surrendering his or her heart and life to Christ on an ongoing basis.
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• Experiencing fellowship with other Christians.
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• Growing in Christ through “being” and “action.”
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• Discovering and using his or her God-given gifts and abilities.
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• Reaching out and sharing the love of Christ with nonbelievers.

Unless you know what the target is, you cannot hit it. For us, the target became health through balance. As we begin to reflect Christ and become more like him, the focus of our lives will shift away from self-centeredness and toward serving him through every area of our life. That is health and balance.

So if we as a church were trying to produce healthy followers of Christ, our leadership team had to decide what the best tool or delivery system is to produce that desired result. Eventually we agreed that small groups are the best environment to produce health through balancing the biblical purposes in each person’s life.

Whenever you start a new approach to ministry, you usually get the question of “why?” Why should we do small groups? What makes small groups a good method for helping people develop these five things in their lives? Over the past 15 years, we have realized several things about small groups that makes them an effective strategy in growing people. Keep reading