Church Planting that Starts with Small Groups (Part 6): Build Leaders Continuously
Here’s the next installment in the Church Planting w/ Small Groups series.
________See also Intro, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4, & Part 5_______
Multiply leaders and small groups regularly.
If a weakness of small groups is their tendency to become inward-focused, the contrasting strength is the potential to give participants numerous opportunities for discipleship and growth. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of leadership development, where the very nature of multiplying small groups promotes the rapid development of new church leaders.
Not everyone can effectively lead a small group, but believers with leadership gifts should be identified and empowered, intentionally given authority within specified boundaries while an established leader maintains responsibility for the ministry.[1] Small groups provide an ideal workshop for the development of emerging leaders-which has been identified as a vital contributing element in the survival of church plants. A study conducted by the North American Mission Board discovered that, “Of those church planters that provided leadership training to church members, 79 percent of their churches survived compared to only 59 percent of church plants survived among those who did not provide leadership.”[2]
While this factor isn’t exclusive to the small group context, small groups certainly do provide opportunities for hands-on involvement in an array of leadership roles: Teaching, mentoring, facilitation, discipleship, prayer–there are few aspects of ministry that don’t surface in the small group microcosm.
[1] Aubrey Malphurs and Will Mancini, Building Leaders (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 40.
[2] Research Reflection: How Many Church Plants Really Survive-and Why?, 3.
