[0:01]
G'day, I'm Scott Sanders and welcome to the Reach Australia podcast. This is part two of a two-part series on small groups in the ecosystem with Richard Sweatman, maturity pastor at Hunter Bible Church in Newcastle. If you haven't listened to part one, I'd encourage you to listen to that first. But if you have, then enjoy part two of small groups and the ecosystem. Previously we looked at working out how the small group ministry might fit in the ecosystem

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and we thought about that now, where and then how but this talk we'll look at small groups themselves in the ecosystem and again we'll use that same terminology of now, where and how and I'll introduce the idea of trend data and a few other things. So firstly now how would you describe the small groups in your church at the moment where are things now we talk about a now thing we'll also talk about trend data there's what are the measurable things you can find and can you sort of talk about qualitative stuff

[1:03]
as well what impressions stories or anecdotes are out there so let's start with some quantitative things and here are things that I think you should try and collect I think they're fairly basic to figure out so how many groups do you have what demographic groups do you have so men's women's daytime online whatever How many people are in the groups? What is the average group size? What percentage of your members are in a group? And if you have some sort of group leader coach, how many do you have and what is their ratio to leaders? That's fairly basic info.

[1:35]
Hopefully you'll be able to collect that. If you want to go a bit further, you could try and gather some other things such as what is the average attendance at group? How long do leaders lead for on average? How long do groups last for? What is some of the NCLS data around groups? So I like question 31. do you value most at church groups are one option there or question 62 how confident are people in bible study leading and if you want to go further you could design your own survey about group life so that's measurable things there are then qualitative impressions around group life

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and here's some questions for you and your staff team and key leaders how confident are you in your leaders maybe score that out of 10 if you like are people growing in groups are people keen to keep coming back to groups each year? How often do you hear positive stories of group life? How many of your groups do you lose sleep over? What does your staff team or key leaders think about groups? How do your groups compare to other churches? Now, if you put all this together, you can get a reasonable, honest, and potentially hard to handle description about where the group

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ministry is at. And some would be good, some would be encouraging, some of it might be a bit depressing to think about but that's the reality that's the now so then secondly we need to think about output goals this is the where where would you like your small group ministry to be in the future what would you like the reality to be uh in and in what space of time so these are the things you should be praying for regularly now working out output goals for the ministry itself could be for yourself or it could be collaborative with your staff team or key leaders and again your output goals could be measurable things like some of those trend data things so

[3:15]
I would like two new groups next year or a greater percentage of members in our groups say moving from 42 percent to 60 percent for example or I'd like to have two small group leaders group leader coaches supporting the team or I'd like to bring average group sizes down from 18 to 11 or something like that so our goals can be quantitative but our output goals can also be qualitative things stories each week or each month about people growing in groups or our leadership team rates

[3:45]
our group leader morale as eight out of ten rather than four out of ten or I'd like to be in a place where I'm not losing sleep over certain small groups so it's there's some more qualitative output goals the where now it could be all a bit overwhelming to try and figure out how to get these output goals that's okay it does take mental effort to do the work it's not intuitive but I think it's helpful to pray about the process and work through the process and then kind of narrow these output goals maybe just to three or four that might seem a bit small but I

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think if you hit those three or four you're probably going to hit those other goals that you weren't able to quite put into words so trying to think of three or four output goals to work on so that's the where in this improved small group ministry and then thirdly you need to figure out your input goals this is the how how we're going to get there what can you do to contribute to these output goals what's going to appear on your to-do list over the next month or the next four months what is something you could tick off when it's done now Graham Fuller suggested many of these I think in his

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session on small group myths he sort of identified the myth and then if that myth wasn't true then what would we do so I'll highlight some of these as well and these are fairly general if you were to adopt them into for yourself you'd I move them towards being a smart goal, I'd say. But in general terms, here are some possible input goals that'd be worth your while. First one is to recruit, orient, and train new leaders. Every small group ministry is dealing with a shortage of leaders. As Graham said, they just won't appear automatically. So one of our inputs needs to be continuous, persevering, recruiting,

[5:25]
orientating, and training of new leaders. For example, just yesterday, last night, Joe Clark, my colleague and i ran a night called leaders in training for people who could have group leading on their agenda for next year or should so we gathered some people we taught the bible we spoke about maturity we interviewed some current leaders we had some small group discussion all with the purpose of planting the seeds of small group leading in these people now it's a bit small sadly there was about 25 people there would have loved maybe 50 80 people there but it was something

[5:57]
it was helpful maybe we can improve it but there you are certainly not assuming that leaders will arise automatically and in this we kind of um yeah bear in mind that uh that idea that graham talked about of keeping a low bar to leadership then secondly another uh input goal is to start new groups always be looking to start new groups we tend to think that groups meet demand but we're better off thinking that new groups drive demand new groups leads to more growth and new groups tend to fill up and new groups fit with gospel optimism and they kind of train new leaders so

[6:31]
starting new groups is good. In Graham's illustration this is making the dam bigger. An idea worth mentioning at this point is that you might need to let some groups die. Groups can sometimes get to a place where even though their members love them and but they are not necessarily meeting your purpose of Christian growth. According to the research in yeah leading small groups that thrive book groups that have been meeting for a shorter period of time contributed more to spiritual growth although plus 11 years apparently also seems to be good interesting anomaly all right so starting new groups another input goal could be to support

[7:06]
the leaders through team gatherings team gatherings have the benefit of building a sense of team among group leaders we call them team training nights other people call them huddles doesn't really matter at the team gatherings you can encourage leaders and equip them you can share vision win people the strategy equip people with theology and bible knowledge and ministry skills at the moment we run two all-in meetings a year and then two meetings where our small group coaches gather people gather leaders in their homes so they watch some video content from me and have

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a discussion fourth input goal you could consider is to support the leaders through a coach system at some point there'll be too many leaders for a paid staff member to oversee and support a volunteer coach system is essential for growing the ministry we call ours l2s meaning leader of leaders but they go by different names and the simple brief for a small group coach is to equip and encourage leaders and to manage as many elements of the small group ministry as possible they do that by prayer and texts calls meetups focus coaching and so on at our church they work

[8:07]
also on group formation and placing people in groups and identifying leaders and training much as possible and this year we even had l2s and other lay leaders start two new groups and close one group without me even knowing this is ideal and fifth point is to establish a clear pathway into groups as graham said people won't usually find their way into groups organically especially if your church reaches a certain size and even then sometimes if they do join a group it might not be a good idea

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for example they might think they're a christian only because they've been or they might disagree with key doctrines or the vision of your church. So if you can build a clear pathway, that's great. Is there a process whereby your volunteers can work out if someone is a Christian? And is there some sort of joining or membership pathway? Will people head towards groups knowing what the purpose of groups is about and be on board and great your leaders? Can you write that pathway down, make some diagrams and infographic, whatever? So there's just some examples of what could be really helpful input goals

[9:09]
that would lead to some output goals. And yeah, so to recap, in this talk, we've looked at the small group ministry itself, how to figure out where it's at now, looking at trend data, ways of getting to the where, the output goals, and then thinking through the how, yeah, all the input stuff. So hopefully that's helpful in equipping you to improve your small group ministry over time. Well, no doubt you found this podcast helpful. My prayer is that you've got one or two things you can implement with your team in the next two to three months.

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Now the Reach Australia podcast is part of the Reach Australia podcast network So if you like this podcast You might also like The One Thing Where you'll walk away with one solid practical tip for gospel centre ministry every week Or you might like the Church Planting Australia podcast The title pretty much says what it is It's all about church planting Or you might like homegrown faith You get an opportunity to hear from Richard and Joe About everyday theology So check out the Reach Australia Podcast Network.