The standard approach to group leadership is to develop leadership on a 1:10 ratio: one leader (or couple) for every 10 members. Missional Communities often have a larger ratio, often 1:50. Of course we say that the goal is to develop apprentices so that they can lead a group on their own in the future, but apprentices are future leaders.
5 Problems With Individualistic Leadership:
- The leader feels like it’s his or her job to make the group work.
- The group looks to leader to make the group work. This in combination with #1 causes the group to be leader-centric instead of Christ-centric. The fact that this issue is so little discussed in the literature on small groups and missional communities baffles me.
- There are usually some things required of a leader that he or she is not good at doing. As a result, the leader ends up expending inordinate energy trying to improve weaknesses instead of investing that energy on things which he or she is good at doing. For instance, a leader could be great a leading meetings but horrible at providing care and follow up during the week.
- Leaders never get a break. Can you say burnout? I talk to too many leaders who secretly confess to me how tired they are from leading their group, but they don’t want to tell their pastors because they know how important small groups are.
- An individual or even a couple working together usually cannot establish a culture for the rest of the group to enter. You might say that it’s the responsibility of the entire group to set the culture, and I guess in an idealistic world this would be the case. However, usually the group at large sets the culture around the lowest common denominator, leaving the leader asking what he or she is doing wrong.
Life group lessons from the early church teach us that team-based small-group leadership would have an impact on our group strategies in the short run. I know many pastors who balk at this idea because they immediately do the math: 1/2 the number of groups. I’m not saying that we need to make some kind of radical shift from singular leadership to team leadership. That won’t work. The problem is the fact that we have developed a church culture that is founded upon individualistic leadership.
Question for us today: How do we develop more of a team-based culture within our groups?
If you want to explore more about life group lessons in the early church, there are some great academic reads on this subject. Joel Comiskey has written a very accessible introductory text entitled, Biblical Foundations for the Cell-based Church.
