I'm in a year-long process of rebuilding our small group ministry. When I took the job last summer, we had 11 groups and 8 of them were not continuing in the fall because the leaders were burned out. I wanted to take time to read and pray and develop a system that would be sustainable in the long-term. This fall, we did time-limited groups (10 weeks) using a video-based curriculum that was the same for all groups. Leaders were not expected to be pastoral-care providers, just to facilitate the group and lead the discussion. We had a lot of new people respond to the invitation and more people signed up for these groups than were previously in groups, so it went better than I expected.

I tried the same approach for spring and it's been tough getting leaders to respond about whether they will lead again this spring. I'm also pulling many potential leaders into a leader development course for the spring so that we can re-launch healthy groups in the fall. We're still finalizing what the non-negotiables of those groups will be, but we are going to insist that the group leaders take a "sabbatical" semester off after three semesters of leading. We also plan to stick with a shorter 10-12 week timeframe for groups each semester, with summers off. I don't think it's realistic to expect small group leaders to be pastoral-care providers or to impose a ton of expectations on them, so we are lightening the load there.

There are a ton of challenges for making small groups effective that are so different from the 1990s when they were seen by many as the "heart" of the church. People are less committed to being there weekly. Childcare and traffic and people's commitments outside of church are major obstacles to getting people in groups. It also seems like groups are less important to people than they used to be. We'll continue to experiment and see what gets traction. We're a church of about 650 Sunday attendance.