Brian Jones writes an article for the Christian Standard entitled
"Why Churches Should Euthanize Small Groups." It's worth a read, as his points are both relevant, useful, and said with the right heart. However, I have to disagree with it on many points. Before I share why, let me summarize what the article said. Here is an excerpt from the beginning:
“I haven’t really figured out the small group thing,” I confessed to [a pastor].
“Well, Brian, that’s because they don’t work. Small groups are things that trick us into believing we’re serious about making disciples. The problem is 90 percent of small groups never produce one single disciple. Ever. They help Christians make shallow friendships, for sure. They’re great at helping Christians feel a tenuous connection to their local church, and they do a bang-up job of teaching Christians how to act like other Christians in the Evangelical Christian subculture. But when it comes to creating the kind of holistic disciples Jesus envisioned, the jury’s decision came back a long time ago—small groups just aren’t working.”
“Finally,” I said, “I’ve met someone who’s got the guts to euthanize this small group sacred cow."
His main points are as follows:
- The best small groups are formed spontaneously, not forced. What began as a staple venue of how Christians met was messed up by Americans trying to put too much structure to it.
Well-intentioned Christians, armed with the latest insights in organizational theory, let their pragmatic and utilitarian hearts delude them into thinking they could organize, measure, and control the mystical working of the Holy Spirit in community in order to consistently reproduce disciples in other contexts.
- Small groups are too often led by baby Christians. "If you can read, you can lead"—referring to a list of study questions—is flawed. A baby Christian can't lead people to where they haven't themselves gone.
The Achilles’ heel of the modern-day small group movement is simple: Small groups don’t create disciples; disciples create disciples. And modern-day small groups are led, for the most part, by people who have attended the church, had a conversion experience, led a reasonably moral life, and can read the study-guide questions, but are not disciples themselves.
American churches have lowered the bar of small group leadership to an absurd level. In fact, it’s so ridiculous most churches would be better off not even having small groups than to offer them with leaders who aren’t disciples.
- Jesus wouldn't join your small group because he would be out talking to lost people instead.
Jesus would actually be doing what small groups say they want/should/need to be doing, but they can’t, because they’re too busy being a “small group” inside the confines of your small group’s ministry infrastructure.
The author seems jaded on the issue of small groups, and perhaps rightly so. He has probably seen small groups fail, dissolve, turn inward as people forget that they're supposed to be outward-focused, drive people backwards, or leave them the same instead of propel them towards spiritual growth. But I don't think it has anything to do with the system. How else were small groups so effective in small towns in the first century and later? How did they bring so many new people and start so many new small groups?
I think the problem is this: People are already coming in with the wrong attitude. They're not serious about growing spiritually, so it doesn't happen. They're not serious about helping their brothers and sisters, so they don't. And they're not serious about reaching out, so they don't. We simply cannot expect a system to do those things for us. As with anything, it requires real effort. Small groups are not magic.
Of course, each church is different, because each church is comprised of a different group of people. In the college group that I am a part of, Christians in Action (CIA) Tampa, we had the opposite happen than what the author described. To our surprise, more visitors were coming to the small group meetings than they were the supposedly "evangelistic" Debriefings, and we realized why: People were craving deep connection, and the Debriefings were intentionally watered-down to be "visitor-friendly." Naturally, new people gravitated toward our small groups when they realized that they had more to offer, and the more we watered down the Debriefings, the more they fizzled out. And looking back, the people who actually stuck around did so because they were a part of a small group.
I think that at first, it completely threw us for a loop. We were told to bring visitors to Debriefings, but not to small groups, because we were afraid that the material might be too deep. Of course, that proved not to be the case. I think that this is a mistake that kills a lot of small groups because of the paradigm that we set up. The definition that a lot of us have of a small group goes something like this: "A venue for Christians to help other Christians without the eyes of visitors on them, or without having to be careful about what you say, or without anyone but your trusted brothers and sisters to tell your problems to." Because non-Christians don't have problems, right?
What small-groupers need to realize is that there isn't
going to be a venue where we can retreat from our Christian duties. That's supposed to be the thing that small groups are helping people to see. Thus, I think it would be a problem if we differentiated an "evangelistic small group" from a "regular small group." Doing so would not only be severely limiting to the direction that God might have that small group go, but it's assuming that God has something in mind for the institutional non-evangelistic small group—which he probably won't bless.
Furthermore, I think people feel more comfortable when they get to hear Christians be honest about their struggles. Even psychologically, studies show that people are perceived as "nicer" when they reveal more of who they are. By continuing to have this intractable definition of small groups—whether for it or against it—we deprive people of this opportunity to connect and perhaps soften their view of the "Christians are all hypocrites" notion, if they have it. That is, assuming we're doing with small groups what we claim we are doing with them, which is sharing our struggles.
For us, small groups have been helpful both for personal growth and for outreach. The caveat, though, is that the people in the small group must be willing to put effort into both being honest and putting things into practice like lifting other people up, whether Christian or not. Small groups allow us to practice loving our brothers and sisters in a controlled enough environment that we can go and use what we've learned with people in the world. I think of it in essence like a laboratory for real life. Does that mean that we can't use those skills a little early? (The reason I use this analogy is that sometimes your own brothers and sisters are a lot more forgiving!)
I admit, however, that our college group has been guilty of suffocating our small groups with a list of study questions. Not that it's always a bad thing when people actually answer the questions with real, deep answers and confessions, but it severely limits a small group's potential in that if someone needs to get something off of their chest that might not be related, they are not given the opportunity. Really, I think that this is a serious problem, and I completely agree with his distrust of it.
To conclude, my point is that largely, the problem is not with the venue, but the people. How many times do we try to change the "venue" of church to make it more appealing to different groups—young people, for instance—and it doesn't work because people are there simply looking for Christ? I am willing to bet that Mr. Jones is largely right, in a broad sense. However, I feel that the blame is sadly misplaced. If the problem is with people's hearts, would banning small groups really help?
