Inverting Small Group Expectations
The reasons we are least likely to join small groups need to become the reasons we are most likely to stay.
Small group ministry has, for me, always been the locus of community building and discipleship in church. The struggle for pastors is that only 20-30% of the regular attendees at a healthy church want to participate in small groups.
So what do we do to increase engagement?
One seductive answer is that we create small groups that cater to the preferences of the population. We happen to have a good idea of what people are looking for.
In general, people want to join small groups for spiritual reasons ahead of social reasons. While creating a dichotomy between spiritual and social reasons feels false to me, the conclusion it reveals is important: when drawing people into small groups, focusing on spiritual benefits over social benefits may resonate more deeply with a congregation.
This conclusion makes sense. Many people feel that they are over-scheduled and are not excited to add something that feels like an extra social engagement to their calendar. Hence, relational reasons for small groups will fall flat. The conclusion also makes sense in Evangelical circles where there is little catechetical formation for both children and adults. Thus, Evangelicals are always looking for intellectual nourishment. People in my church crave organized, systematized, and concise information about the Bible and Christian theology.
According to a recent study, the top three reasons that drive a person to join a small group are:
I want to learn more about Christ
I want to learn more about scripture
I want to develop deeper expression of my faith
Now, those impulses are terrific for the average Christian. But what I’ve found is that those are almost always gateway drugs into the highly relational life God calls each of us to.
Strangely, these spiritual reasons aren’t necessarily the long-term drivers of spiritual growth. They are the intellectual entrance into the Kingdom which eventually becomes about outward care, love and relationship.
Why is that? Our pursuit of knowledge of Christ ebbs and flows and is also almost always unsatisfying in Christianity. Because attempting to know Christ will always bring individuals to a point where the intellectual answers do not bridge the gap between belief and practice. In simpler terms, faith will always be expressed most fully in action, in doing.
So if a church offers small groups on the basis of the top three spiritual reasons in the study above, is that a healthy approach? Well, yes, in a way. But a spiritual seeker might then have their expectations inverted as they realize that most of spiritual growth stems from the social reasons for joining a small group—learning and formation happen most in community. The community actually drives the spiritual growth and creates sustainable paths of formation. Then, the social drivers and spiritual drivers help to push each other.
What I find interesting is that the top reasons for joining a small group (i.e., the spiritual reasons), are so intuitively good. There’s no doubt that we all agree they are important, possibly, the most important impulses we have in life. Yet, when we enter a small group community, we begin a journey that opens our eyes to the relational portion of Christianity which is like revealing the rest of the spiritual formation iceberg.
For churches, the question to ask is: how am I presenting the power of small group ministry to my flock? An equally important question is then: how am I pushing small group leaders to create spaces of strong, resilient and intentional community, rather than classrooms about the Bible? If a church treats small groups like Sunday school, there will almost certainly be no real transformation in it if people then do not find themselves in a more relational ministry. The reasons that people are least likely to join small groups need to become the reasons they are most likely to stay.