Are Your Small Groups Too Small?

We sat down with a group of leaders in the church to hear how they approach service projects in their communities and beyond. Below are their responses to our question: How do you facilitate your small groups for community service? 

Larry Osborne (North Coast Church): Everyone of our groups is required to do a minimum of one community project a year. They get to experience something together they wouldn’t do on their own. And we work with a whole series of church and community organizations to match them with a service project. Many of our small groups do two more a year.

Dino Rizzo (Healing Place Church): We do the same thing. With every group, you have to make sure that there's an outreach component, whether it happens twice a year or is ongoing,

Greg Ligon (Leadership Network): It’s kind of baked into the leadership structure at the church I attend, and actually a couple of our leaders are what we call “bridge champions.” Every life group has a bridge they’re trying to build in the community.

Greg Surratt (Seacoast Church): We have an expectation of everybody in the church: Acts 4, everybody serves. That's what we're here for, and we want everybody to be involved in community transformation, first in the church, a minimum of once a month. In the community, a minimum of once a quarter. In the world, once a year. That's the expectation. Does everybody do that? No, but they hear it all the time. Here's my assumption that I’m working on right now. I think a small group is too small to do a whole lot of community transformation. If you have a small group of eight to 12 people and half of them show up to serve, at the most you now have four people. What can you do with four people? So we're looking at mid-sized groups as being a better opportunity to serve so that if half show up, it’s 25 rather than four.

It first started to become clear to us when we started encouraging our small groups to adopt neighborhood blocks and a group would schedule a time to serve, but only half showed up. So now we’re saying, “Why don’t you join up with two or there other groups that have the same passion for the same block?” I think what we're driving toward is cause-based mid-sized groups that break down into small groups for care issues.