Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

mid-size communities

Transitioning Away from Small Groups (Part 2 – SG or MSC)

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Back in May 2013, I was featured on Rick Howerton’s Blog with NavPress for a four day interview on “Small Groups or Mid-Size Communities?” He has since joined the staff at Lifeway, and thus the previous posts have gone away. Here’s the second post:

2. When you met with your leadership team, especially your senior pastor to consider the move from small groups to mid-size groups, what questions arose (and/or what conversation took place) that drove your church to move to mid-size groups?

Well, first of all, I try not to use the phrase “mid-size groups,” since most people like to create acronyms and this movement would become…well, let’s just say that the Asians would like the flavor of it. But getting back to your question, my senior pastor and the leadership team knew about the problem, as I mentioned in the previous post. The statistics showed that our small group system was good, but not great. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, our small group system was so successful, that we even hosted our own small group conference with Willow Creek’s Bill Donahue. This conference happened even before small group conferences were popular. However, as our church continued to grow, the percentage of individuals in small groups didn’t. There were spikes here and there, but no sustained growth.

Since the senior leadership knew about the problem, they were open to suggestions, but the ideas had to be well thought-out and processed through before any trigger could be pulled. After all, small groups had been such a powerful part of many our church members’ spiritual journeys.

The change management process was long and arduous, but it was well worth it. I could have done my research, written up a proposal, and brought it straight to the senior leadership, but I decided to take the better approach. This approach involved praxis, extensive conversation, and collaboration amongst staff, key lay leaders, and the unconnected in our church.

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What Didn’t Work With Small Groups? (Part 1 – SG or MSC)

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Back in May 2013, I was featured on Rick Howerton’s Blog with NavPress for a four day interview on “Small Groups or Mid-Size Communities?” He has since joined the staff at Lifeway, and thus the previous posts have gone away. Here’s the first post:

1. What were you trying to accomplish in your small groups that was not being achieved and why do you think the smallness of group life was keeping you from accomplishing that?

If someone were to tell you that 25% of their church was in some form of community life (i.e. small group or mid-week programming), how would you react? Other than a slight, “Yeah, that’s pretty typical” response, you probably wouldn’t think much of it. Well, what if someone were to tell you that their church had grown by 31% over the past 10 years, but that the number of people engaged in community remained the same? You’d probably think that was pathetic, and move on to learn from someone else.

That was the case at my church, and I was hired to do something about it.

Being a learner, entrepreneur, and systems thinker, I quickly learned and piloted every small group technique and method under the sun (not all at the same time though – I’m not that crazy). I wanted to experience the astronomical growth that the books promised me. I tried everything from a semester model to a sermon-based group model. I even launched new groups every month, in addition to piloting online groups. Sure, I saw growth and new people getting connected regardless of the method that I used, but there was always a bottleneck and people who didn’t want to join. The growth wasn’t exponential, it was additional – and that wasn’t good enough for me.

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Mid-Size Community Values – BELONG

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Values influence behaviour and decision making – both implicitly and explicitly. They are essentially the personality of an organization, or in this case regarding mid-size communities, the personality of a movement.

If these six BELONG core values are embraced in your mid-size community, then you will not only find your mid-size community to be a place of community and mission, but you will discover that others will be irresistibly attracted to your mid-size community.

What do you think? Would you change anything about these six BELONG values?

MSC Core Values

Planning a Semester Ahead (Best Practices for Mid-Size Communities)

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One of the best things that you can do for your MSC is to plan a semester out.

This not only frees up your MSC lead team to allow your bi-weekly lead team meals to actually be “discipleship meals” instead of “planning meetings,” but it also allows you to strategize as to the overall direction of your MSC. This way, you can take a longer term perspective and not be constantly stressed with thinking and planning for your next gathering.

Here are the steps to planning a successful semester for your MSC:

  1. Once a semester, organize a 2-3 hour block of time for your MSC lead team to come together and plan out the focus of all the gatherings for the next 3-4 months.
  2. Make sure that your MSC gatherings have some sort of rhythm. For example, since my MSC has a young families focus, our rotation looks like this: mission focus, marriage focus, mission focus, parent focus, mission focus, marriage focus, etc. We also do an occasional fun gathering once every 6-8 weeks (see the attached files for an idea of this).
  3. Once you brainstorm and plan out what the focus of all your gatherings are, assign a point leader for each of the gatherings. This person doesn’t have to do all the work and necessarily teach that gathering, but they are the representative on your lead team who will make sure everything will happen for that day. So they are the master coordinator of that gathering.
  4. Share the plan with your MSC using some sort of template like the one below.

Tools to Use:

As you’ll see on the “Calendar and Groups Template,” I also wrote out all the different open small groups that are happening in the off weeks of my regular MSC gathering. This is to help the people in my MSC realize all the different options of small groups they can join for deeper study and community. If you don’t have small groups formed yet, or don’t have as many as I do, then please use that space as a way to envision people to form smaller groups.

Mid-Size Communities or Small Groups? Interview with Rick Howerton

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Back in May 2013, I was featured on Rick Howerton’s Blog with NavPress for a four day interview on “Small Groups or Mid-Size Communities?”

Rick Howerton is one of the most genuine guys that I’ve met and I’m so grateful for his ministry to me and to the global church! Since then, he has joined the staff at Lifeway, and thus the previous posts have gone away. So I’ve taken the content that I wrote for that interview and put it up on my site in the links below:

I encourage you to read through my answers to the following questions on his site and engage in a conversation with us about this viral concept. Click on the links below to see my answers.

Let’s talk!