To be honest, I am biased against Haggard’s model because I see small groups experiencing basic Christian community as foundational to both the first century church and the church of today. Interest groups are valuable and can be an important part of a church’s overall discipleship and outreach strategy, but in my view they are not the same as basic Christian community—where people are committed to each other over time to love and serve each other and together reach their friends. Also, as Haggard himself mentions in his book, the Free Market system actually is considerably more work administratively. This is because there is such a variety of different types of groups to oversee and because the system requires three major launches each year.
Some churches have found significant help from the Free Market model, however. And I think one of Haggard most valuable insights is that for a small group system to succeed it must follow a model that fits the senior pastor’s personality and that he or she is excited about.
The Connecting Church Model
The story that Randy Frazee tells near the beginning of his book The Connecting Church sounds remarkably like Haggard’s opening story—but the two books’ conclusions and models are a study in contrasts.
Like Haggard, Frazee recounts that the development of their new small group model emerged from a brutally honest discussion among their pastors. At a planning retreat of Frazee’s congregation, Pantego Bible Church, one of the pastors mentioned that he didn’t like his small group. Then all the pastors confessed that they found their small group disappointing. This set in motion in analysis of what the problems were. They arrived at several pivotal conclusions.
• Their problem was not the size of the groups. Community can best be experienced in small groups.
• Their problem was not the people in their groups. Those involved in their small group system sincerely wanted to experience community and grow in Christ.
• The problem with their groups was that people were not experiencing genuine community.
Their conclusion that their groups’ primary problem was a lack of community set in motion a passionate study on Frazee’s part on the ingredients of true community and how his church and other churches could cultivate and experience it.
The small groups at their seeker-targeted church had previously been primarily affinity groups, but because they concluded that community happens more deeply and naturally when people live closer each other, they shifted to a geographically based model—with small groups based geographically and congregational units within the church made up of all the small groups in a given area. The conclusion about the importance of geography was not something that Frazee concluded based on personal convictions or simple common sense. He had done extensive reading on community as it occurs in a wide diversity of settings—kibbutzes, gangs, monestaries, work teams, fraternities, etc. He argues that close geographic proximity is essential for community, because it allows people to be more available to one another and to interact frequently and more spontaneously.
