I listed the three things that’d prevent you from starting a group:
- You; you don’t have time to lead one.
- Your people; they don’t wanna come.
- Your church leadership; they don’t want one.
Today, why people don’t wanna come to your group.
And believe you me, I’ve been there. I’ve led standing-room-only groups, and I’ve also led groups where nobody showed up but me. (And the next week, not even I showed up.)
Why don’t people join small groups? Well, for the same reasons you don’t join certain small groups.
- You don’t care about that topic.
- You don’t care for those group leaders.
- You don’t care for those group members.
- Impractical time.
- Impractical place.
- Ulterior motives—and they won’t get met.
And even after you meet all these concerns, people still might not come to the group, ’cause the unexpected came up. (’Cause it does. That’s life.) But we can at least address these basic issues when we put together our groups.
Picking a topic.
What subjects are the people in your church interested in?
I know. Some of you are thinking, “What, a seeker-sensitive small group? It shouldn’t matter what they’re interested in. There are all kinds of things they need to look at!”
Yes there are. But until God’s personally convicted them to look at those things, are they gonna come to your group and look at ’em? Nah.
I’ve started many a small group, based on what I, or the leaders of my church, felt the people needed. Bible study groups. New believers’ groups. Theology groups. Apologetics groups. Evangelism groups. How was the attendance? Sucky.
We live in a culture of irreligious Christians, who only follow Jesus not because they know they need to, but only when they feel like it. The same attitude extends to church. (Although there’s still a significant number of irreligious Christians who wrongly think if they don’t go to church, they’re going to hell. That’s why they attend; it’s also why they do nothing more.) If they barely feel like attending church, they’ll feel even less like attending a small group. So, bash seeker-sensitivity all you want: If we don’t give them something intriguing, they won’t come.
Now, you might think the solution to this problem would be a dose of on-fire, disciplined Christians. You’d be wrong. Yeah, they know what they should study. But you might not be offering it. They need to look at spiritual gifts, but your group is looking at great women of the bible. They need to look at great women of the bible, but your group is studying Joshua. They need to study Joshua, but your group is looking at spiritual gifts.
Either way, you need to find out what the people want.
Take a poll. Doesn’t have to be a scientific survey; a straw poll will do. “Here are five subjects I’m looking at; which do you like best?” Or better, “If you could pick any topic, what would you want to look at?” (’Cause they may not like any of your five.)
Find a subject which gets at least five people fired up. Not “Gee, that sounds interesting”: Fired up. Excited enough to promise to attend. ’Cause if everybody is mildly interested in your subject, anything will draw them away. They’ll skip your small group to look at a Tumblr site full of funny cat GIFs.
“Oh Lord, don’t tell me he’s leading it.”
Willingness and ability are two different things. Watch American Idol tryouts; you’ll see what I mean.
Lots of people want to lead small groups. Doesn’t mean they have any kind of knack for it. Some of them just don’t know how to teach. They’re gonna bore you. Somehow they’re gonna find the least-interesting parts of an interesting subject, and drone on and on about it. Your time together is just gonna crawl, like the world’s slowest slug.
Some are blindly ignorant. Blindly partisan. Get offended easily. Have an off-putting sense of humor (or worse, no sense of humor at all). Assume they’re infallible. Get too creepy, too handsy, too flirty. Smell odd. Or otherwise rub people the wrong way because of character flaws and personality defects.
And nobody tells them they have these problems, because we’re too polite. Well, to be more accurate: We don’t trust how they’re gonna respond to uncomfortable truths. That’s why people won’t always tell you what your flaws are. They don’t know you enough to trust you. Worse: They do know you enough—and know they can’t trust you.
Even if you don’t suspect you’re part of the problem, get some feedback anyway. Find honest friends to watch you lead a group, and give you feedback.
No, they can’t give you feedback if they’ve never seen you in action. How you behave with your friends, or one-on-one with people, is different from how you behave as a group leader. I’ve had friends who couldn’t believe I work with kids, ’cause they just assume I’d be better at teaching adults… ’cause they’ve never seen me work. But if they give you advice based on assumptions, it’s not gonna be any good. They need to see you lead a group first. So: Borrow someone else’s group, and have ’em watch.
Then give them full permission to tell you the truth. Bear in mind, because you did after all ask them to look for stuff, they’re gonna be over-critical. But pay attention to the things which really worry them. And don’t defend yourself. (“That’s how you interpreted it, but what I was really trying to do was….”) You won’t get to defend yourself to everybody else who makes a first impression; you gotta deal with how they automatically, even unfairly, perceive you. If you come across as “weird,” you gotta figure out why—and you gotta figure out how to turn it into the good kind of weird instead of the bad kind.
Improve whatever needs it.
“Oh Lord, don’t tell me she’s gonna be there.”
There are certain Christians whom I just want to sit on the other side of the church from. Stands to reason I don’t want to go to a small group when I know they’re gonna be there.
Yep, they can have all the same qualities as those alienating leaders. And worse. After all, they’re not in leadership; they’re not required to be mature, growing Christians. They can be all kinds of spiritually dead inside, and an absolute drag on our small groups. They can make it so nobody wants to attend.
What do we do with such people? Simple: We don’t invite them. If they invite themselves, we un-invite them.
Yeah, Christians have been horrified when I say that. After all, shouldn’t we be accepting of anybody who wants to come, just like Jesus is? How dare we make outcasts? Jesus loves the outcasts.
First, there are outcasts, and there are outcasts. There are people who are just plain socially awkward. I have no problem with them. If they make other people uncomfortable, it’s the other people who have a problem: They haven’t outgrown the thinking of their high school caste system. Frankly, the last thing I want is a “cool kids only” small group; I’ve been in one, and that was more than enough.
What I’m talking about are the fake Christians who are fruitless and sinful, who drag the group down instead of encouraging good and discouraging evil, who indulge in all sorts of fleshly behavior but have all sorts of Christianese excuses for why they do it—and why we oughta accept them regardless. These people should be outcasts. So cast ’em out.
Second: You’re disinviting them from your group. Not excommunicating them from your church, or Christianity. Your church, the whole of your body of Christians, should be able to accept all sorts. Your small group only takes a subset of the whole body. If they don’t fit the subset (i.e. growing Christians), it’s not for them. But Jesus is always for them.
Wrong place. Wrong time. Too busy.
In college, I had a friend who regularly complained about the poor attendance at his small group. Stands to reason: He lived 40 miles away from the church. He figured he drove 40 miles to get to church; they could return the favor and drive 40 miles to his house. (I’m not quite sure how much of a favor he did us by joining us… but then again, I already talked about difficult small group leaders.)
In grad school, I had a friend who regularly complained about the poor attendance at his Monday night men’s group. It was football season. That should tell you everything. But he was irritated by how they’d rather watch the Monday night game than listen to him rant every week against things which were sin for him, but not necessarily anyone else. (Again with the difficult leader issues.)
When you pick a place and time for your group, you need to figure out a place and time which works for everybody. It can’t be an impractical time, like 5 a.m.—unless everybody’s agreed to it, as was the case for one friend’s sunrise prayer group. It can’t be an impractical place, like five towns away, or in a tiny room, or in a house that smells like soup even though the homeowner doesn’t cook—again, unless everybody’s agreed to it, as was the case for an office prayer meeting that crammed into one small office, or a Christian twelve-step meeting that took me 90 minutes every week to get to, or any of the many other small group meetings where the need for fellowship outweighs the weird places and times.
But do what you can to keep the place and time from becoming a reason to not attend.
“Too busy” is our culture’s catch-all excuse for non-participation. Sometimes it’s true. Often it’s not. Most of us can figure out a way to make time for the things we find important. The only reason we somehow can’t make time for a small group, is because we don’t wanna. So don’t schedule it for a time that’s difficult to make. (Especially don’t do the passive-aggressive thing of saying, “I picked a difficult place and time because if you’re really committed, you’ll come anyway.”) Don’t let scheduling be an excuse.
Again, poll your people. Find out what time works best for them. Accommodate them.
They have their own agenda.
I didn’t go to my high school youth group because I wanted to get closer to Jesus. I came to hang out with my friends. My youth pastors, on the other hand, wanted to get me closer to Jesus. So, sometimes we butted heads.
I did go to my church’s singles group because I wanted to get closer to Jesus. (I would’ve preferred another group, but this was one of those churches which segregated its members into “singles” and “marrieds” and “seniors.”) The other singles, on the other hand, wanted to meet other singles. So, often we butted heads… and ever since, I’ve avoided churches which wanna involve me in the singles program.
I’ve mentioned, more than once, my class on Revelation. I wanted to study the bible. The folks in the class wanted to talk about End Times conspiracy theories. It didn’t last, obviously.
This is the thing: People come to our small groups for all sorts of reasons. Mainly it’s to build relationships, and secondarily it’s to stay on topic.
But some come with another topic in mind, and don’t care who they alienate in pursuit of it. They wanna show off how much they already know about the subject. They wanna co-lead the group. In some cases they wanna sabotage the group: Some years ago, a men’s group was reading a book, and one person only came so he could condemn the book. (I sat out the group ’cause I knew if I were there, I’d tear apart the book too. Seems the other guy lacked my restraint.) They want neither relationships nor knowledge. And you gotta ask them (privately) to behave, or leave. Some will insist on doing neither. Most will just leave.
Others come with the wrong kind of relationship in mind. In high school and singles, many were looking to meet and date someone; Jesus wasn’t the priority. Or, in other small groups, one person would attend solely because their crush attended.
More often I see couples attend a group, where one is interested in the subject, and the other not so much. A husband and wife attend; the wife is interactive and the husband uninterested. A mother and daughter attend; the daughter is unresponsive and the mother is constantly prodding her. Yeah, this puts more butts in seats, but nobody really wants deadwood in their small groups. Still, it happens.
But in the cases of the relationship-minded, quite often they’re gonna leave. The uninterested husband is gonna finally say, “I’m not going,” and the interested wife will say, “Fine; I guess I'm not going either.” Same with the mom who pushes her daughter to attend. Same with the guy who’s only looking for dates, but can’t find one in your group--or does find one, and, his problem solved, doesn’t bother to come back.
What can you do about this? Win ’em over. Get the passive participants to join in. Get to know them. Ask them what they’d like to get out of it, and make adjustments if suitable. Get ’em interested in the group.