Review: Dare to Be Uncommon
New from Group, Dare to Be Uncommon: Discovering How to Impact Your World, is a new men’s Bible study that is definitely worth a look. Featuring Super Bowl winning coach Tony Dungy, this DVD-driven study will be of immediate appeal. Dungy has great name recognition and is well-known to be both a winner and a…
Read MoreReview: real life discipleship training manual
Looking for a way to equip disciples who make disciples? You may want to take a look at the real life discipleship training manual, written by Jim Putman, Avery Willis, Brandon Guindon, and Bill Krause. New from NavPress, the manual is designed to provide the content for a 12 week experience. Each week in the…
Read MoreThe Why Behind the Way of Your Small Group Ministry Strategy
We all have reasons for the way we’ve designed our small group ministries. You use a particular strategy or system for a reason (or a lot of interrelated or barely related reasons). You may have chosen your system or you may have inherited it when you came on the scene. Sometimes the system was very…
Read MoreThe Last 10% Leads to a Church OF Groups
“We are committed,” he said. It is time and this is the year that we become a church of groups. Being a church with groups is just not getting it done. We’re all in this together to make it happen this year.” Love the determination in those words. Love the spirit. Love the hope. Cannot…
Read MoreMake It Easier To Fulfill Commitments to Host by Smoothing the Path
We all know the situation…20 people commit to host a group and 10 follow through. Or 100 commit to host a group and 65 follow through. I call it the “sign-up to show-up ratio.” What if there was a way to improve the ratio? What if there was something you could do that would exponentially…
Read MoreReview: Real-Life Discipleship
I first started hearing about Real Life Ministries back in 2007 when Avery Willis came by the Lifetogether office to talk about his latest project. The fast growing church in Post Falls, Idaho was and is an amazing story. When Avery mentioned that they had about the same number of people in groups as they…
Read MoreGroups Interactive’s New Version Takes a Big Step in the Right Direction
I had a chance recently to connect with Andy Ivankovich, the founder of UpperRoom Technologies, and take a look at the newest version of Groups Interactive (A friend of mine from Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, where Max Lucado pastors, put me onto UpperRoom a couple years back). I saw several things that will…
Read MoreAll Kinds of Groups Leads to a Church OF Groups
One of the key components of the church of groups conviction that it will take all kinds of groups to connect everyone. Conversely, one size doesn’t fit all. One type of group really won’t work for all of the people who are part of your congregation. And as we’ve talked about frequently, if you hope…
Read MoreCultivate Identity Before the HOST Ask
You never really know where the next idea will come from. If you’ve got your eyes open…they really can come from almost any source. My latest ideas come from Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Chip and Dan Heath’s most recent book). You really need a little set-up to catch this…
Read MoreTop 10 Posts for August 2010
In case you missed them, here are my top 10 posts for August (in descending order): Top 10 Fantasies of Churches with Small Groups (August 2010) 10 Essential Skills of Small Group Leader (June, 2010) How to Launch Groups Using a Small Group Connection (May 2008) New from Kerry and Chris Shook: Love at Last…
Read More