4 worst ways to engage your church small group

A good church small group is more than a Bible study that meets once a week. It’s a collection of group members committed to being involved in each other’s lives, growing in discipleship, and strengthening your local church community. If you want these relationships to flourish and support a healthy church, avoid these common communication traps:

1. Unpredictable meeting schedules

We’re all incredibly busy, and making sure that everyone’s calendar syncs up for a small group meeting can be a nightmare. In order to accommodate many different schedules, it’s tempting to “be flexible” and change the meeting time. But this ultimately hurts more than it helps.

The more a group’s meeting time bounces around, the more communication it takes to keep everything running smoothly. Inevitably, small group members will miss meetings or, worse yet, show up for a group meeting that isn’t happening. Over time, inconsistent attendance chips away at small group health and the overall church life of your people.

Find a schedule that works and stick to it. If you have to cancel occasionally, that’s okay (but don’t make a habit of it). Even if you sometimes end up with a smaller group, a set schedule is going to serve you better in the long run and help your church leadership and small group leaders know how to better support your ministry.

2. Unclear communication practices

Let’s say that you’re scheduling a small group potluck or planning a night focused on prayer and sharing prayer requests. How do you communicate? Do you phone everyone? Text them? Ideally, you have a clear church communication strategy that doesn’t require anyone to reach out to everyone individually or lay the burden of communication on one person.

A Facebook group or shared calendar can be a great way to keep everyone on the same page. Your church website, a church small group page, or a mobile app can also make church small group communications even easier and turn effective communication into a shared responsibility. This is especially helpful in a small church where church staff and ministry leaders are juggling a lot of church management tasks at once.

If your church uses church technology well, your small group network can stay aligned with the broader church’s mission and ministry. Have a set communication channel and make sure every group member understands how to use it.

3. Undefined small-group goals

What’s the purpose of your small group ministry? Is it to provide a place to invite new people from your local church and community? Is it to study the Bible or discuss Sunday’s sermon? Is the focus fellowship, discipleship, or helping people grow in faith through prayer and communal christianity? How does a discussion occur?

If your goals aren’t clearly defined, how will you know if things are going according to plan? Setting clear objectives gives you a target and helps you define success. This isn’t just important for your church small groups: It’s essential if you want to recreate your successes (and avoid your mistakes) in a new group.

When church leaders, pastors, small group leaders, and ministry leaders clarify why the group exists, how it supports your church community, and how it fits into your ministry strategy, it becomes easier to measure small group health, encourage members, and align with the Holy Spirit’s work in your church.

4. Unknown next steps

Like yogurt, every small group needs an expiration date. If the same group meets too long without filtering new people in and releasing others to lead other small groups, they can become ingrown and unhealthy. There’s a danger in a small group going well forever, and that can create little cliques and cabals within a church instead of a thriving network of small groups across your church community.

One of the biggest challenges for small groups is knowing when it’s time to transition—especially if everything’s going well. There needs to be a vision for growth and change from church leadership. Otherwise, you’re not growing new group leaders, small groups pastors, or small group leaders, or inviting new church members to experience the life-changing power of Christian relationships and fellowship.

But it’s not enough to know what the next steps are—they need to be communicated. It’s a lot of work to get a small group to a place where everyone is okay with being transparent and vulnerable. People will naturally resist having to start over with a new group.

That’s why you constantly need to cast a vision for where you’re going: how this small group ministry supports the early church model of communal christianity, how it builds a healthy church, and how it encourages ongoing discipleship and ministry in everyday church life. When pastors, church staff, and ministry leaders clearly outline next steps, small groups become a powerful expression of your churchs mission.

Small Groups Are a Privilege

Transformation happens through community, but it needs to go deeper than what we experience on a Sunday morning church service. That’s what makes small groups so powerful. They get us out of our comfort zones, allow us to be real with others, and through them, we grow as disciples, church members, and contributors to the larger church community.

When we avoid these communication pitfalls and invest in clear, consistent, effective communication, we set these church small groups up to succeed, flourish, and change even more lives as the Holy Spirit works through your ministry!

To learn more about nurturing engagement within your church, download the free ebook, The Definitive Guide To Successful Church Engagement, today!