Jeff Gibson on How Central’s (AZ) Small Group Strategy Has Changed
Hearing about the latest innovations in small group ministry is one of my absolute favorite things. Another one is sharing those things with you!
One of the fastest growing churches in the country is Central Christian Church in Arizona. Jeff Gibson is the Life Groups Pastor there. Here’s his take on how their groups strategy has changed as they’ve moved from two campuses to four:
Why did you change?
Central Christian Church is 52 years old, and since the mid-90’s had a traditional groups structure with a Small Group pastor who led coaches who led groups. In 2007 we added our second campus, adding two full time staff members, one specific to coaching and leader development and one for connection. This worked well, as the campuses were only 11 miles apart and you could split time between both.
In the past year, however, we have added two more campuses, proving what we had been told, which was that the fourth campus changes everything. It became impossible to have a relational abilities that we as a small groups staff had been used to. We realized that we had to have “feet on the ground” without adding staff.
What changes did you make?
The biggest change we made was to have the campus pastors become the small groups champion on their campuses, raising up leaders and encouraging connection with the support of small group staff, who became Life Group Central Services. Life Groups Central Services is responsible for the vision, policy and administration of the ministry. Each campus also has a core team of three volunteers who support the campus pastor by leading teams that have ownership of events, promote serving opportunities for groups and directly connect people into groups.
What have been some early wins?
The biggest win is that more people are now bought into Life Groups on a ministry level. The quality of what we are providing has improved because each volunteer who steps up into campus level leadership brings a new perspective and an enthusiasm for seeing people get into groups and to grow spiritually in them. We also have increased our relational capacity. Like many churches, we put a lot of effort into our website, using technology to get people into groups and to interact with group leaders. As a result, we lost some of the face to face interaction that people still want and need. This change has helped to regain that interaction. Because at the end of the day, Isn’t that why groups sit in circles?
What’s a “tomorrow problem” that you need to start working on right now?
In January we are pulling out the stops for a Life Group connection month, highlighting our specialty groups each weekend (Men’s, Women’s, Support, Marriage, etc.), culminating in a big connection event for our Neighborhood groups on a Sunday evening at each campus. We know we will have literally hundreds of people looking to get into a group. Because we have a belief that new people connect best into new groups (via Larry Osborne), we will be creating dozens of groups that night. The two ways we are preparing for that is to raise up as many leaders as we can to be ready to lead new groups, but more importantly, we are asking 30 existing group leaders to mentor a new group for four to six weeks following the connection event, raising up a leader from within the group, and training the group on how to be a group. This way the new leader has a built in coach connection and one more volunteer has increased his leadership and his influence.
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Want to connect with Jeff? You can catch up with him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter. He also blogs at JeffGibson.me
