Take us back 27 years. What were you doing before small groups?
We did the typical classes. I led these things called Timothy Teams that I walked a bunch of men through. They had notebooks full of information, but they weren’t necessarily treating their wives and children with any more biblical obedience and godliness. It was that way across the board.
I looked around at our people, and they were becoming more rigid and prideful, and they weren’t really becoming more obedient. I just didn’t see a lessening of sin corresponding to an increase in information.
In 1985, I realized that people didn’t need more information and class time; they needed more lab work. The people who had a lot of information weren’t living it out. That’s when we decided to stop the classes and get people into small groups, which we now consider the hub of our ministry.
What steps did you take to make the shift from information to relationships, as well as secure leadership and congregation buy-in on this new approach?
I got the approval of the elder board and informed the congregation we were going to cancel some of our “come and fill your notebook” services and that we were going to get into small groups where we could live out our faith and talk about the application of what we heard on the weekend. I said we were no longer going to do classes; we were going to do life.
Once implemented, how did you start to gauge the effectiveness of this shift to make disciples?
When the church was small, you could measure effectiveness anecdotally. Now we measure hard numbers. But in the early days, we started watching for community to take place. Were people expecting the organized church to minister to them in a crisis, or was the small group picking up the ball? Were people expecting the church as an organization to do things out in the community? Or were they getting out and serving with each other.
The other thing we tried to measure, again anecdotally, was sin because it’s impossible to measure righteousness. You can fulfill all the spiritual disciplines and still be in the middle of an affair. Three of my six mentors were Type A, jump-through-every-discipleship-hoop personalities, and three of them had affairs. That’s when I began to say, ‘All this little checklist stuff isn’t creating godly people.’ So I came to the conclusion that I can’t measure righteousness; I can measure sin. That’s the sign there’s something wrong.
Lindy Lowry is the editor and director of communications for Exponential.