“God’s work is accomplished by a combination of human and divine effort, said one of my seminary professors, Dr. Joe Ellis. “We cannot do it without Him; He has ordained not to do it without us. We depend on each other.”¹ I love this quote. I’m amazed by the reality that we actually get to partner with God in his …

The topic for our August 1 Small Group Ministry Practitioners Hangout was “Training leaders to be shepherds to their little flock.” How do you train them? What do you teach? Great discussion; we all learned a lot from one another. +Jay Daniell, +Josh Hunt, +Emil Kerekes, +Jonathan Jordan, +Adam Workman, +Brandon Boyd, and I participated this month. Here are a few highlights. We started by discussing …

Do you remember the first time you were invited to a small group? I do. I had visited Centerville Christian Church in Dayton, Ohio, and met a few people my age. (I was 28 and single at the time, and was shopping for a church. I had not yet fully given my life to Christ.) They invited me to their group, …

I thought today would be a good day for a humor break. As a big Dilbert fan, I loved this strip. Going way back to 1991 for this. Does this ever happen in your small group? Does it ever happen to you? Shared from the Dildert website: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1991-08-27/, by Scott Adams.

Are you an authentic small group leader?  If we as small group leaders say we should all be witnesses yet do not do so ourselves, this hypocrisy teaches people to be disobedient. It gives the message, “I say you should share your faith, but I do not really mean it because, as you can see by my actions, I don’t …

Right after Heidi and I got married, we moved into a forty-unit apartment building. We wanted to start a small group to reach out to the people who lived there who did not have a relationship with God, but we had no idea how to start one. So I asked Glen, a minister at the church we attended, how we …

Provide the right environment, and growth happens. For my four children–all now teens and young adults–growth is natural. As long as their mom and I provided the right conditions–good nutrition, a safe environment, opportunities for exercise, as well as schooling, spiritual disciplines, the power of example, and so forth–we knew growth would be automatic. Lack of growth would have meant …

When you add another log to the fire, you know what happens. It is soon ablaze itself and it eventually helps keep the other logs burning as well. But the log must be touching the other logs. Set a fresh log outside the fireplace and not much happens. This is what we love about community: We fire each other up. …

When groups pray together, it’s like adding logs to the fire. This is part three of a blog series I’m calling “Small Group Fireplaces.” In Part One, I stated that small groups can be the fireplace, or the environment, where revival and transformation can occur, but it’s not the fire, or even the match. In Part Two, I began describing …

Small groups have no more chance of initiating revival or transforming people’s lives than an empty fireplace has of starting a fire. Your small group should be a fireplace–an environment where God will do what only he can do in changing people’s lives. But you are not the fire, or even a match. I began this blog series by describing …