Tuesday, February 7

The Breakdown - Defining Groups

Anyone involved in small group ministry will be challenged with, "how do we distinguish, define, or 'group' our groups. When I was at the Willow Creek Small Groups conference last fall they were talking about how they are moving to 'regional groups' and breaking them down to geographical units. If you live in neighborhood "X" then this is your group...

Here are the designations from Fellowship Church's Home Teams: Single, Married, Age, Location and then a few that are either men only or women only. They don't mix marrieds with singles, and they try to stick with age designations.

Great discussion on the last post. Thanks! Let's hear from a few of you - do you set parameters on who can go to which group? Do you have a free for all system? What are the pros and cons?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At Hayward Wesleyan Church, we have a free for all system really. We have about 40 different groups -- and they are all grass roots. The curriculum and leader needs to be approved by our small groups pastor, but other than that, we give them a lot of latitude.
We have groups for all different types of people -- senior citizens, young moms with toddlers, widows, recovery, divorce -- etc -- so, often the stage and situation of life determines where people land in our small group system.