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Small Groups in Support of the Sermons

Depending on the size of your church and the town you’re in, there are great arguments for creating small groups based on topical interests, life-stage affinity, or geographic location. But regardless of the hook that brings people to your small groups, it’s appropriate to find ways to leverage those small groups to support your sermons—because these are the people who are going to hear those sermons.

Some pastors use small groups as a foundation. They give small-group leaders discussion-provoking questions to pose to groups the week before a message. This accomplishes several great things when they come to the worship service that week:

1. People already have the issues you’re going to raise at the front of their minds.

2. They have already started analyzing their opinions on those issues. This cuts down on the amount of time their minds wander during the sermon to do that processing.

3. Some will have already done biblical research on the issue. Don’t underestimate the power of the psychological benefit that comes when you reinforce something people found for themselves that week. Insights like, “Hey, I can study the Bible myself for information on real-life issues” start the self-reinforcing cycle of study —» feeling fulfilled —» feeling more motivated to study.

4. People will come to the message with a heightened alertness and curiosity to see if you agree with what they’ve found and what new insights you’ll bring to the issues.

5. The benefits don’t just come during the worship service; they can continue afterward. Instead of just setting the foundation, some pastors see small groups as the bookends around the message.

6. When people sense tension between what you’ve said and the thoughts they’d come up with that week, they’ll have follow-up questions. Yes, this is a good thing. Therefore, you might want to prepare material to give to small-group leaders the following week for the questions you anticipate. The discussions that come afterward provide a third opportunity for people to review the topic you raised. Psychological studies indicate that going over something three times plants it far more than three times as deeply into someone’s mind.

7. Many have found that participation in small groups increases because people are eager to resolve the tension raised between their thoughts and the message. You might even move further toward an inductive preaching style to encourage the hunger for after-thinking.

8. You’re giving them the opportunity to own the conclusions they reach. We live in a cynical age—no surprise given our current media, advertising, politics, and even the publicized lives of some Christian leaders. People don’t necessarily accept something just because the pastor said it. (Nor should they, as we can see in the praise for the Bereans in Acts 17:10-11.) The truths people discover for themselves are the ones that will guide their lives.

Prepare your materials with sensitivity to the awareness each leader has of his or her small group. Give your leaders bite-sized pieces so they can select how much is appropriate for the purpose of their group and the things going on in its life. Make it clear that what you’re giving them isn’t a script. Encourage them to reframe it in ways appropriate for their audience. The leader of a small group of bikers will know how to present it in a way that’s relevant to that audience—which will be dramatically different from the leader of a small group organized to do a verse-by-verse walk through Leviticus! College-group leaders will shape it differently than a leader of seniors.

It’s true that by taking some of your small-group time each week to follow up on the last sermon and prepare the ground for the coming sermon, you’ll cut down on what additional material the small group can cover. But we all want more than passive audiences; we want changed lives. A key truth we’ve learned from our decades in church education at Group is that true transformation is more likely if we cover less material, but cover it more deeply and in different ways. If your small groups support your sermons, the meat of your message will go much more deeply into the lives of people—and they will make it their own.