This past Sunday Ed Stetzer preached to us here at the Summit. It was awesome. Dr. Stetzer is a statistician who loves Jesus and is a gifted teacher. Most statisticians just have the gift of, well, crunching numbers. His sermon sunday hit home with me as he talked about the great role the church has in advancing the kingdom of God. One thing that stuck out in particular was an analogy he used for church-planting. he called it “birthing” new churches. The analogy goes like this…planting new churches is like having a baby. It requires a lot of preperation, and the event itself is messy & painful. But then 2 years later you find yourself wanting to do it again.

Planting a church is not a formulaic process and when it means people leaving the church to plant new churches, many might resist because they dont want to leave their friends or their comfort zone. But when a new church plant starts seeing people come to know & love Jesus, they tend to forget about the messiness and pain because the reward is so much greater than that sacrifice.

At the Summit, we use the same philosophy and even same language as our church planting center. That is, we want healthy small groups regularly planting new small groups. We dont want them “multiplying” or “splitting.” We want them raising up a core team who could be sent out from the group to begin a new small group experience with those who have not yet found a community of believers here at the Summit.

Is it messy planting new small groups? YEP! painful too. Ive personally done it 5 times in the last 3 years! But nothing is better than seeing new small groups take on their own lives and really begin to grow. Im telling you, its awesome. So if you are in a SummitLIFE group or if you lead one, you need to be thinking & praying: “When is our group going to plant a new group?” Talk to your group, we’ve got a lofty goal of planting around 45-50 new small groups in RDU in 2009. We better get rolling.

I will be brief, because it is July 3rd and you got hot dogs & fireworks on the mind. Ive been encouraged by some small group leaders at our church and their grass roots efforts to build their small groups. So I want to share their strategies with you. First, here is how we do it large scale: The main way we connect people is through a venue we have that connects people to the church called “starting point.” Anyone wanting to get connected comes through there. The other way is through a process called “GroupLink.” we hold grouplink events every so often and we also have a portion of our church website dedicated to grouplink where people can find out info about groups. We even have a place on the worship guide insert to indicate on a sunday that they want to get into a group. The problem with both of those (starting point & grouplink) is that it requires some action by those wanting to get connected. They have to make the effort. Many people who would be willing to be in a group, simply dont make that effort. So we come to our grass roots strategies.

1. MEET PEOPLE ON SUNDAY. Some groups have flooded our greeting teams, kidslife teams, & choir and are simply introducing themselves to people and asking if they are in a SummitLIFE group. If they arent, they invite them to theirs. Its awesome and its such an easy way to connect people. By the way, if you are in a SummitLIFE group, that needs to be the default question when you meet someone on Sunday morning. If the response is “no” immediately find a pen & write their contact info down and send it to me.
2. HELP OUT WITH STARTING POINT. 60 new faces a month come through there at our church. We have group leaders who just come down there and help pull it off each week. In doing so, they cant help but invite people to their groups. Thats what we talk about down there. Starting Point is where the “Glenn Gary” leads are for you old-school film lovers. You cant just show-up though, you gotta make it through the Starting Point screening process. But if you are a leader without a place to serve yet, you should consider that.

Regardless of what you do, get on the prowl!

1. 1. Growth takes time – This is critical for me as a “I want results now” kinda person. Spiritual growth takes time. It takes time for individuals and for churches. As small group leaders, we must be willing to live in relationships with people for a significant amount of time. We cannot see them as a “project” but as family members we are investing our lives into. This also means that we as group leaders may never fully see the fruit of our efforts. That should never dissuade us from our great task of helping people grow deeper in love with Jesus.

2. 2. Growth comes through the pursuit – We tend to think we will arrive one day at this great land called “spiritual maturity.” Here is the problem with that: when we do things in hopes of arriving at a level of maturity, we become legalists. We become Pharisees. We grow spiritually through pursuing Christ. Spiritual maturity is simply consistently pursuing Christ & the application of the gospel to your life a little longer than the guy or girl beside you.

3. 3. Growth is messy – Ok this one is for both numerical and spiritual. First off, growing a small group ministry is messy. Once a group gets comfortable it tends to take on a character of its own which is good, but can result in loosing contact with the church at large. As a pastor, I have to be comfortable with a certain level of that happening. That’s called putting trust in my leaders. When leaders launch new groups, it is never perfectly neat and clean. Group members stepping out of old groups to lead new ones isn’t easy, it can be quite hard. But spiritual growth is messy too. People don’t usually just gradually grow up in their faith on some mythical scale from 0 to 10 over the course of their life. The truth is, they grow in spurts and in different spurts in different areas of their lives. You may have a couple who really becomes solid prayer warriors in your group, who you discover is in financial ruin because they have never sought to apply the gospel to their finances. Guess what, you as a group leader probably have areas of your life where you are not sure how to live out a gospel-centered mindset. I will be the first to tell you that I am about to enter parenthood and I have a TON to learn about what gospel-centered parenting looks like. Thankfully my small group has parents in it!

4. 4. We gotta buy in – Not sure how this became a “growth…” blog anyways. One thing im convinced of, by seeing it in our small groups, is that a leader must be fully bought in to the idea that small groups work if they are going to have a successful group. If we aren’t convinced we can see life change happen, our people will see right through our façade and we are wasting time. I implore you, if you are leading a small group and you are not convinced God is going to change the lives of your small group members through their time in your group, get on your knees immediately, repent, and ask God for faith. Im really not exaggerating or kidding. We are not just going through the motions in small groups. We are literally being the church. Please don’t treat the church, the bride of Christ, lightly.

5. 5. Small Groups are Awesome – I love small groups. Im convinced growth happens here better than in any other context. That gets me all excited and I hope you are excited with me.

So I gotta tell you about something going on with SummitLIFE up in Wake Forest. It is seriously cool what God is doing up there and I think very encouraging for the rest of us to hear. In the span of 18 months, the area has gone from one SummitLIFE group with about 12 people participating, to 7 groups with an 8th on the horizon. Let me tell you how it happened and what is so cool about it. Along the way I will identify some key group leaders who allowed themselves to be used by God in this whole thing. Try & Keep Up!

18 months ago I asked a guy named Matt Clark to lead a SummitLIFE group for our Young Professionals who live in the North Raleigh area. He accepted the challenge and brought alongside him a co-leader named Justin Patrick. I’ve become great friends with both of these guys over the past year and a half. They started a group by taking a list of names I gave them and started calling and inviting. A group of people showed up to the first meeting and more came the next time. Eventually there were about 20 people showing up to this “small” group. So, one of the women in the group, Melissa Holland, volunteered (after some nudging from yours truly) to plant a women’s group a little further south down in Raleigh. For 2 or 3 months she battled to get more than four or five women there. Those four or five were committed though, and they lived out community together. I think God was preparing Melissa, a first time group leader, for a great responsibility by keeping her group small during that time. After that slow start, Melissa’s group swelled to about 16 committed women. Now here is where it gets cool. Two girls in Melissa’s group volunteered to come through our Group Planter Training Course. Now those two girls, Elizabeth Preston & Michelle Kenney, are having their first group meeting with their group plant this month! Are you following this? It gets better. Back up in Wake Forest Matt & Justin are now on the verge of planting another group (24 people showed up to their small group Sunday) and already have another guy ready to go out who have been through the training course. During that same time period, the original Wake Forest group (which Matt wasn’t even a part of) led by Jeremy Cox has planted one group in Raleigh (Derek Hamaker) that has already planted a group (Dustin & Seth), and another group in Wake Forest that Russ Dredla & Matt Bennett volunteered to help get off the ground. Not only that, Jeremy is calling up more leaders by establishing 2 guys in his own group, Craig Eggleton & Andrew Hopper, as leaders in his group. Lost in all of this yet? I know I am!

For you bottom line people, that is 12 people to right at 100 people in 18 months. That simply wouldn’t happen unless groups planted more groups.

Listen, these leaders would each tell you this has been an act of God that they are simply riding the wave of and they are right. God is doing a great work. What is encouraging to me as a leader is that these folks allowed themselves to go along for the ride. There were plenty of sacrifices, uncertainties, and leaps of faith during the past 18 months. But this is small group planting at work. It isn’t necessarily easy, but it is awesome. Do you see in all of this a very VERY exciting thing happening? Disciples making disciples! “Go therefore unto all nations and make disciples…” Matt 28:19-20. So thank you Wake Forest & Raleigh groups for encouraging the rest of us with what God is doing in your lives. To the rest of our group leaders, who in your group could be the next SummitLIFE group planter?

This concept is still in the formalizing process in our heads here at the Summit, so this post will be short since the language is not completely worked out yet. But here is the gist:

At the Summit we believe churches planting churches is the best way to reach the world with the gospel. We also believe EVERYONE at the Summit is a potential church planter. We want to do more than just say that though, we want to create an atmosphere where our people can have a tangible experience in what it is like to plant a church. Soo…

Our small group strategy is for every group to plant at least one new small group every 18-24 months. Just like we don’t split churches to create new ones, but plant churches, we don’t split groups to create new ones, we plant groups. That means a group will commission one to two people or couples to go through our Group Planting Training course and then that new core team will bring in new faces to start building biblical community with. The head of the missions department at a local seminary is one of our group leaders and upon going through the training course he commented that it was very similar material to what he uses to train church planters (What an encouragement!).

This model gives everyone who is involved in discipleship at the Summit at least somewhat of a tangible look into the church planting process. A leader in a prominent missions organization, after learning of the number of church planters we are sending out in ‘08, recently asked our lead pastor “do you guys have a church planting factory or something there at the Summit?” The answer is yes, our small groups!

Again, I think this concept has far reaching implications for how churches connect discipleship strategies to their church planting strategies. Once we get this together a little more, we will talk about some of those implications.

Id love to hear your thoughts on this concept.