Small Groups: Community Service

I get emails:

Hi. I lead our church small group program. I read a response from you to a blog concerning Sunday night church and was interested in what you said your church does. You said that your groups purposely seek to be involved in community service including cooperating with social service organizations. You finished by saying that it took some time to set up but now it is running fine. Would you please pass on to me what took so much time to set this up? I would like our groups to be service minded too. Any help would be appreciated.

Here’s what happened.

Small groups have different purposes. Some are intentionally evangelistic. Others are purely pastoral. Some are educational. Ours started out as assimilation groups. After we’d built a new building, we’d had a influx of members and felt the need to help the new members integrate into the church’s community. And so the leadership of the program put together teams across age-group lines, resulting in multi-age, assimilation groups. And they worked well, for a while.

But that idea ran its course in a couple of years, and we’ve tried all sorts of things in the last 10 years or so. But the program had developed a bad case of “what’s the point?” I mean, dinner and a lesson on that morning’s sermon was nice, but not really satisfying.

A new member (transferred from a non-institutional church) suggested that we ask the small groups to take on community service projects. He agreed to chair a committee that worked with local social service agencies to find volunteer opportunities for our groups. We are fortunate to have members who are social workers, probation officers, and such and so very aware of the agencies in town, and he was smart enough to get them on his committee.

The committee members met with numerous agencies and found that many had no interest in working with a church, because so many churches had let them down in the past. Others had no programs that could use weekend or evening volunteers. But they came up with an impressive list of agencies willing to work with us, willing to let us work with them as Christians, and needing help that we could provide even with 40-hour workweek jobs. (We insisted that we couldn’t help if we had to leave our Christianity at the door.)

We then asked the groups to pick at least one agency to work with — or to find their own project. Most of the groups worked with a social agency. One group “adopted” a young mother of two in diapers who’d just lost her husband in a car wreck, helping her any way they could think of. Another group adopted a neighborhood of elderly retirees — not church members — volunteering to do yard work and a neighborhood clean up. Some groups did fundraisers to free enslaved children or buy shoes for the needy in other countries.

They called the effort the ADOPT program. Here’s the ADOPT URL: http://www.universitycofc.org/community_outreach.html. Here’s the URL for the small group program: http://www.universitycofc.org/small_groups.html

Frankly, we elders we just amazed at how well things went. Many of the groups were newly energized and did very well. Others struggled. But on the whole, participation was better and — much more importantly — we were finally participating in God’s mission to the world at a congregation-wide level, rather than through a program that involved just a few.

The impact on the congregation as a whole was dramatic, because the change in the small groups helped solidify a change in our hearts — to reach out to the poor and needy and sick.The Spirit was already on the move, but this change in the small groups seems to have made dramatic changes in how we look at our Christianity.

Yes, some of the groups don’t get it as well as others. And all small group programs require intensive management to really work. And they are not the great evangelistic groups your read about in the books — we’ve never managed to get a lot of evangelism out of the groups. But the heart of the church is changing — and that is producing evangelistic results.

Our experience is that groups need oversight. The leaders need coaching/mentoring — a big group meetings of 20 leaders at once don’t work because sometimes the leaders need to discuss problems with individuals.

In short, to have the results we’ve had, I think three things are critical —

* First, the Spirit needs to be moving the church in this direction. I know it sounds uncomfortably mystical, but the church isn’t going to go this way without help from Above. If you don’t see a yearning for greater community service in your church already, spend some serious time in prayer and include instruction on God’s will in this area in your preaching and teaching first.

* Second, do your homework. 98% of the church have no idea about how to get involved in their community. Make it easy for them by pre-clearing several agencies and let the groups pick. And if they’d rather work on a project off the list, that’s fine … maybe better.

* Third, provide leadership support through regular coaching/mentoring sessions in groups of no more than 5. Four fit nicely around a table at the WaffleHouse, so that’s a good rule.