Acts 29

We are a church of almost 2 years old approaching 600 on a weekend and have made our major focuses our Sunday morning service (making sure there is a strong Word and an atmosphere where the Holy Spirit can work) and Home Fellowships/Community groups. Here are a couple of thoughts to address a vast topic:

1. Simplicity: We have determined from the very outset to keep the format of HF's very, very simple. We follow the Acts 2:42 model: Fellowship (hang out time), Word (discussion and application of the teaching from the Sunday service), Communion/Eating together (this is occasional, not every week), and Prayer (often breaking into men/women's groups, small groups, etcetera to minister to one another at the end of the evening, or spontaneously as the need arises). Our groups go for approximately 2 hours total. It’s simple (requires almost no preparation other than people taking notes at the morning service, especially the leaders), effective (it meets social, relational and spiritual needs), and duplicatable. This also gets the people of the Body on the same page, and makes it much easier to train leaders because we know what they are doing on a weekly basis. These thoughts deal with format of the groups.

2. Leadership: This is really the guts of the HF's. Without good leadership, your groups will flounder. I would start immediately to formulate a plan for finding and training couples (strong singles?) to lead groups. We have done the following:

a. Leader groups: We initially got all of our strong couples together (5) and met with them in a prototype group for 8 weeks. All of these couples were capable of leading groups and some already had, but we wanted to start with everyone on the same page. I led this group, but had each of the couples lead before it was over, and we critiqued each couple, giving positive input and help. After 8 weeks, we presented all of these couples to the church and 6 groups were born. Each group immediately began thinking reproduction (i.e. who will be my apprentice). We soon handed our group off to our apprentice couple and went and led another leader group of 5 more couples, 4 of which took groups at the end of the 2nd 8 weeks.

b. Support for our leaders: We only have 14 groups at this point, so this happens through monthly phone calls and meetings, early morning trainings (every 3rd Saturday morning from 7 a.m.-8:30 a.m. led by one of my elders who is a godly man with much experience in this area), email, phone calls, and a small group of men, myself included, who makes sure that our leaders are well and encouraged. We will likely hire someone to oversee this area as time goes on and as we grow in numbers of groups, but for now we have found a man (one of the elders) who is passionate about it and does it as his service to the church. We don't have membership, so we are finding most of our leaders from our current groups (i.e. they are being trained as apprentices and beginning to lead groups after they have been proven in their current group). We are not laying hands on anyone hastily. We actually have a list of 8 requirements for all of our leaders. All of them meet these requirements. They are a sort of "membership covenant".

3. Church Culture: We are striving to make it part of the culture of our church that if you attend our church, you naturally are moving toward involvement in a Home Fellowship. Currently we have almost 45% of our people in Home Fellowships, many of which are too large, and are working hard and heavy to raise up new leaders and new groups.

To create a church culture I have found that:

a. The upfront leadership/lead pastor/leadership team must be involved in hands-on promoting and keeping HF's before the people. If HF's become a side program of the church, they will never be a strong part of Body life. We accomplish the lion's share of our pastoral care through our HF's, freeing the elders to do our work (i.e. praying, studying the Word, training leaders and getting God's heart for the church).

b. You've got to make it simple for people to get plugged in to a HF. We are working on many different ways to do this. We have found that many people won't come cold turkey to a group. They must be personally invited by someone. So we are working on our groups and leaders to reach out more readily in this area on Sundays and beyond.

c. We introduce all of our new leaders/couples on Sunday mornings at both services and have them up at the front at the end of services for people to connect with. Many people won't come to an already established group, but will plug in to a group that is just getting started. As we get larger, it may be that we won't have the luxury of introducing everyone like we are now, but for the time being it is working beautifully to get groups started and people plugged in.

There is much more that I could write, but will leave you with these thoughts. The most exciting and radical things we are seeing in the church are happening in Home Fellowships. I can't encourage you more strongly to keep up the fight in this area. If you get a strong network of Home Fellowships rolling in your church, the pay-off is huge! Start immediately and don't let it get pushed off to the side of what you are doing. The mileage from people being in relationship like this is immense.