Some time back I wrote about The Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay, an engaging and challenging book about creating incarnational community.  I love it.  If you haven’t picked up your copy yet, you can order it right here.

Couple weeks ago I received a copy of the new Tangible Kingdom Primer, designed as a “spiritual formation tool to prepare your heart for mission” and a “field guide for starting mission together.”  Take a look at the Table of Contents:

• What is Missional?  Even your group leaders have begun to hear this word.  What does it mean?  How does one live missionally?
• What is Incarnational?  Can you be missional and stay home?
• The Gospel: Is it just a “small set of beliefs or doctrines?”  Or is it something that should transform every area of our life?
• What is Community?  What do you need to have it?  Can you have it alone?
• Living Out is “the natural and deliberate process of living among, listening to, and loving people in culture, with the desire to connect them to our Christian community.”
• Inviting In is about “friends not targets.”
• Becoming an Apprentice isn’t about learning about discipleship.  It’s about the practice of becoming a disciple.
• The Intuitive Life is “important because life rarely happens in steps, programs, or logical sequences.”

Let me say, “I like the way this study is formatted!”  An 8 week experience developed to help groups establish some new patterns, this book is truly a primer (a book of elementary principles).

Each week implements a series of practices:

• Day 1: Exploration introduces the topic and helps establish an understanding of the concepts.
• Day 2: Meditation provides a scripture to soak in.
• Day 3: Change asks, “What does this idea mean in your life?”
• Day 4: Action is about putting the idea into practice.
• Day 5: Community is an opportunity to gather with friends who are putting these ideas into practice with you.
• Day 6: Calibration revisits the theme from a new angle.
• Day 7: Communion is intended as a day to be intentionally restful.

I think you’ll find the topics very engaging and the format very provacative.  Whether you have groups in your ministry that are ready for a next step or are dreaming of the day when your church is truly engaged in its community…this is a study you ought to check out.

Looking for a soup-to-nuts primer on small group ministry?  For most churches,  Activate: An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups by Nelson Searcy and Kerrick Thomas will neatly fill that need.  Unless yours is a large church (average adult attendance of more than 1,000), this will be a resource that will fill in a lot of blanks.

Covering the Journey Church methodology very thoroughly in 223 pages, Activate guides you from philosophy to implementation in a semester based approach.  Is it an “entirely new approach to small groups?”  No.  Does that make it any less valuable?  No again.  Incorporating concepts from a variety of sources, the Journey approach is a neatly designed system that will work in most churches.

If you’ve attempted to construct a small group system the way you’d select food at a buffet, the wisdom of implementing a system will be immediately obvious.  As the authors challenge in the introduction, “Read and digest this book.  Grab a highlighter and work your way through the following pages.  Make notes in the margin.  Disagree with us, laugh at us or raise your eyebrows.  We don’t mind.  Over the next 200 pages, we are going to show you a small group system that can consistently accomplish the goals we mention above.”

I like the concrete, step-by-step approach of this book.  If you’re looking for a systematic approach, this is a good one.  You can buy your copy right here.

By the way, here are two links you may want to check out:

ActivateBook.com
ChurchLeaderInsights

Interested in developing sermon-based small groups? Sticky Church by Larry Osborne is packed with helpful insights.

In addition to providing the nuts and bolts of how it works, Sticky Church carefully explains the underlying assumptions and principles North Coast has used to develop their sermon-based small group strategy. Finally, you’ll also find an appendix that is full of the forms, job descriptions and covenants you’ll need to begin to implement the concept.

Is the strategy for everyone? No. Is it designed to do it all? No, but no approach is. Clearly designed to connect the people you already have, Osborne acknowledges that his vision is “that every Christian in our church needs to be velcroed to significant relationships.” While Sticky Church is not outreach oriented, it is a great blueprint for implementing a small group strategy that will help members and attendees connect.

Want to add it to your arsenal?  You can order your copy right here.

My cool friend Bryan Doyle gave me a copy of The Tangible Kingdom the other day and it caught me right away!  You won’t find a more engaging book about incarnational community.  The story of Hugh Halter, Matt Smay and Adullam will grab you by page 3.  When you get to the chapter on the 1700 Year Wedgie…you’ll be toast.  Good stuff.  If you aspire to get Hirsch but end up rereading the same line again and again…this one’s for you!

You can pick up your copy right here.

Looking for leader training ideas?  Simple Small Groups, newly released by Baker Books and written by Bill Search, a veteran small group practitioner, is a great new resource designed to make effective small group ministry simple.

Rather than over-complicate the subject, Search isolates three simple and essential ingredients that every effective group must have, identifies them with a single word, and then proceeds to explain the role played by each of them.  The best part?  He goes on to flesh out the nuts and bolts of how it works.

There are a number of really helpful sections.  My favorite aspect is that each section concludes with a diagnostic set of questions to help determine what your next step is in the development of each essential component.  I can easily see this getting a lot of use!

If you’re like me, you’re looking for resources that are about how it can be better. Simple Small Groups is one of those.  You can pick up your copy right here.

Few churches have had as much influence on how small group ministry happens as Willow Creek.  And very few books have as large an impact on how small group ministry happens as Building a Church of Small Groups.  While a lot has changed at Willow Creek  since Bill Donahue and Russ Robinson first published it in 2001, it is still required reading if you’re trying to figure out how to build a church where nobody stands alone.  Some books are written by theorists.  This one was written in the trenches by practitioners.

Based on an adaptation of Carl George’s Meta Model, what developed at Willow in the 90s and the early part of this decade was the practical working out of how to recruit leaders, how to train and develop them, how to care for leaders, and how to develop healthy groups.  If you’re trying to figure those things out, this would be an important book to spend time in.  You can order your copy RIGHT HERE.

Picked up a copy of Church Is a Team Sport: A Championship Strategy for Doing Ministry Together by Pastor Jim Putman of Real Life Ministries in Post Falls, Idaho.  With attendance of 8,000 on the weekend, this 8 year old church is one of the fastest growing churches in America.  Even more impressive?  They’re in a city of 10,000 and a drive-time population of 100,000.   Even more significant?  They’ve connected over 7,000 adults in small groups!

Very interesting stuff.  Want to check it out for yourself?  You can order your copy RIGHT HERE.

Looking for a resource that can walk you through the development of a cohesive and compelling vision, mission, values and strategy concept?  There are plenty of books out there, but I haven’t come across any as complete as Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement by Will Mancini.  Whether you’re the lead pastor or the small group ministry director, this is a book that will not only help you think through the concept but act on it as well.

Church Unique is more than theory.  Detailed chapters on vision, mission, values, strategy and measures are designed to take you carefully through the concept and help you develop actionable plans.

• Defining your vision frame (Vision)
• Developing a missional mandate (Mission)
• Identifying missional motives (Values)
• Developing a missional map (Strategy)
• Clarifying the marks of success (Measures)

I am always looking for resources that will help small group ministries become more effective.  Church Unique will help you develop a more thoughtful approach to the mission you are living.  You can order your copy right here.

One of the challenges in small group ministry is coming up with practical leader training.   There’s just not a lot out there…and what is out there is not always the nuts and bolts of becoming a better small group leader.  One exception?   Walking the Small Group Tightrope by Bill Donahue and Russ Robinson.

The first thing that struck me about this little book is that in some ways it’s a more detailed continuation of Leading Life-Changing Small Groups.  Taking six very important leadership tensions and breaking them down with illustrations and practical take-aways, this is a book that you could use to enhance your leader development.

The six tensions covered in Walking the Small Group Tightrope are:

• Truth vs. Life
• Care vs. Discipleship
• Friendship vs. Accountability
• Kindness vs. Confrontation
• Task vs. People
• Openness vs. Intimacy

See where this goes?  Using the metaphor of a tightrope to frame the discussion, Donahue and Robinson share personal leadership experiences that make the issues very clear and then lead to next steps.  As the authors point out,

Small groups cannot thrive by focusing on either end of the continuum.  They cannot choose friendship over accountability, kindness over confrontation, or task over community.  Rather, effective life-giving small groups must embrace both ends of the continuum, in healthy opposition, and walk the tightrope between them toward authentic community and life-change (p. 21).

One of the most helpful features of the book is that each of the six tensions is supported and enhanced by a group exercise; taking it beyond information to application.  This is an important step and makes Walking the Small Group Tightrope a resource you ought to own and incorporate into the ongoing development of small group leaders in your ministry.

When Carl George published Prepare Your Church for the Future in 1991 it was not the first book on small group ministry.  In fact, at the time it came out there were already many books on the idea of gathering in community with a few others…for Bible study or prayer or accountability or care.  If you’ve been around for a while, or have access to the library of someone who’s been around for a while, you’ve seen other books that predate George’s entry into the small group foray.  But you really won’t find many others that have been as influential.

The concept of the metachurch finds its roots in Prepare Your Church for the Future.  At the time of its writing it meant the next step beyond mega, but not in the sense of size.  More in the sense of organization.  Although size was a factor in its necessity, the concept really unfolded on the realization that in order for churches to grow larger they must grow smaller (sound familiar?).  Taking his cue from churches like the Yoido Central Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea, George proposed that the “organizational principles of a Meta-church allows a church to maintain quality, no matter how much numerical success it experiences (p. 53).”

What are the underlying assumptions on which the meta-church capitalizes?  Take a look at these seven:

1. Churches of the future will be committed to making more and better disciples.
2. Churches of the future will be more concerned with the size of the harvest than with the capacity of their facilities.
3. Churches will be known primarily as caring places rather than as teaching associations.
4. Pastors will genuinely encourage ministry by the laity, despite centuries of modeling to the contrary.
5. Lay ministry assignments will involve leadership of a group.
6. Laity, given the opportunity, will invest time, energy, and money to learn the skills required to do a competent job of pastoring.
7. Pastors and people will remain dependent on the Holy Spirit to make His gifts available for mutually edifying one-another ministry.

The question might be, “Why read it now?”  After all, if it was published in 1991, isn’t it pretty much out of date?  The answer is “no”.  In fact, when you read Building a Church of Small Groups: A Place Where Nobody Stands Alone or Creating Community: Five Keys to Building a Small Group Culture your understanding will be enhanced because you’ll be aware of some important foundational concepts that are found in the organizational structures of both Willow Creek and North Point.

Ready to add to your foundation?  You can pick up your copy RIGHT HERE.