The multiplication request reaches the supervisor on a Tuesday night, with the plan the leader put together.
The supervisor goes through the plan: 13 people, 7 stay in the current group and 6 go to the new one. That looks balanced. And they approve it.
Except they have not visited that small group in 6 months. They follow the numbers and nothing else.
4 months later, the current group meets with 5 people. The new one with 4, and every other week, because the person who hosts it travels a lot. On paper nobody did anything wrong. The numbers added up.
This article is about why the multiplication plan made sense and both groups shrank.
There is no right number of people for multiplying a small group. Every published source gives one, and no two agree, because each of them is a snapshot of the church that set it, not a rule.
What tells you the time has come is something else: someone ready to lead, someone ready to host the group at home, and a core of people who already carry the church's vision.
A group that multiplies just because it filled up tends to produce 2 weak groups. And the one who sees the difference between full and ready is the supervisor, not the spreadsheet.
What is the right number for small group multiplication?
There is no right number.
The church is the one that sets it. It leans on the size of the homes, on the way it trains its leaders, on the reading the pastor has of a biblical text and so on.
You have probably searched already, and seen that every page gives a different number. The most common is 12, and the reason is Jesus.
Except the Bible does not turn that into a rule about size: of the 12, 3 were closer to Christ and the other 9 around them (Mark 3:14 and 9:2, NIV).
And it is worth looking at where that number comes from.
Lifeway, which publishes research and material for churches in the United States, recommends 8 to 16 people, with 12 as the ideal. Except the stated basis is not research, it is the experience of whoever wrote it.
The ones who actually went and measured found something else.
In 2014, Jim Egli and Wei Wang surveyed 1,140 small group leaders in 47 churches in the United States, looking for what makes a group grow and multiply.
They found 4 factors, and none of them is size:
- The leader's prayer life.
- A focus on reaching people outside.
- The care the members give one another.
- How much the leader hands responsibility to the people in the group.
And here I have to be honest: it is not that they tested size and ruled it out. It is that the people who went to measure never went looking for it.
The ones who recommend point at size. The ones who measured found the leader.
Does the number of people not matter?
It does. It just does not decide. What the number changes is the relationship among the people in the group.
And it is that relationship that says whether multiplication leaves 2 strong groups, or 2 weak ones.
There is scientific literature on this, and it also arrives at a number.
Robin Dunbar, the Oxford anthropologist who described the limits of human relationships, and Roger Bretherton showed that we organize ourselves in layers of roughly 5, 15, 50 and 150 people.
The 15 closest people are usually the ones we hold the most affection for. And that is what explains a number that was already going around among pastors: in large churches, the small group rarely goes past 15 participants.
But notice what that 15 measures. It says how many people someone can keep a bond with. It does not say when to multiply the group, nor that multiplying there will leave 2 healthy groups.
It explains why the full room feels full. But it does not say what to do about it.
There is no minimum number for multiplying. There is a tendency: the more people prepared, the closer the group is to multiplication.
What happens when a group multiplies just because it filled up?
Multiplying on headcount alone usually brings more problems than fruit.
I am not being a doomsayer. I know that whoever multiplies this way is almost always following some recommendation. And a recommendation based on headcount has no way of warning you when it is not time.
The problem is what the number does not see.
Remember the group from the beginning of this article? There were 13 people, and the multiplication was approved because the numbers looked balanced.
But of those 13, 4 came every week and carried the group: they arrived early, called whoever went missing, got the food ready. Another 5 came when they could. And 4 had arrived less than 2 months before.
The 7 and 6 split divided by counting. Except the 4 people who carried the group do not split down the middle.
Either they stay together, and one of the sides is born with no foundation, or they separate, and both sides are left at half strength.
A full group is no guarantee of healthy multiplication.
The question left over is whether 2 people can be the structure of a small group. No report answers that. The supervisor does.
In more than 18 years living small group church, I have seen hundreds of groups die after a multiplication done on arithmetic alone.
The current group dies, because it was left without structure. The new one dies, because it was born without strength.
What decides multiplication, if not the number of people?
A healthy multiplication needs 3 things, and none of them is a number.
It is the person who has been prepared alongside the small group leader. And that preparation often does not have to be formal. It only has to be intentional.
The host is not an address, it is a commitment. It is the one person whose absence cancels the meeting.
Both groups need people who make things happen, not only the new one. Problems will come, and what holds a small group together through them is the church's vision burning in the hearts of those people.
Notice what is not on the list: headcount.
A group can multiply into a new group of 4 prepared people, who are already members, already carry the vision and are thirsty to lead.
Another group, with 8 people of whom only 2 are prepared, can send those 2 to start a group from scratch, and that is multiplication too.
What does not work is splitting 13 down the middle and calling it multiplication.
What if the group is full and nobody is ready?
You do not multiply, and you do not close the small group. You treat the problem: the lack of someone to lead the group that multiplication would bring into being.
The way out that works in many churches is the micro group.
A micro group is a strategy for awakening the potential of the people already in the group.
When the lesson is given, the group spreads out through the rooms of the house. And whoever leads the study, the sharing and the prayer is not the group's leader: it is someone the leader sees potential in to lead a new group.
That person, in front of 5 or 6 people they are closer to, may feel more at ease than in front of the whole group. And after a few weeks leading, may find out they can do it.
Now, if the micro group makes sense for one of the groups under your care, it does not start without going through you.
Because changing the format of the meeting is not a decision the leader makes alone. They need your spiritual covering.
Beyond the spiritual covering, that group is going to need you close by.
In the weeks that follow, visiting is not enough. Be in the meetings. That is where you will help the leader choose who leads each micro group, and keep track of whoever is chosen.
And what will show you whether it is working is not the performance of whoever led, it is what changed in the small group.
If the participants still take everything to the group's leader, whoever led the micro group has not become a reference point for them yet.
But when they start taking to that person what they used to take to the leader, a problem, a question, the news about whoever went missing, the reference point is beginning to shift.
That can take more than 4 or 6 weeks. And it may not be worth multiplying with someone the group itself does not yet see out in front.
And all of this is the opposite of sending 6 people to a new house after a leader who does not exist yet.
This text is published by the people who sell the product, so let me start with what it does not do: célula.in does not know whether a group is ready. That still depends on you going there.
What it does is the multiplication planning. The leader builds the split between the current group and the new one, marks who leads and who is a leader in training on each side, and requests your approval. You get the whole proposal, not just the number.
And it shows, on a single screen, how many people have 2 or more consecutive absences across the groups under your care. That is how you choose which group to visit first.
In the supervision area you also see who each leader points to as the future host and as the leader in training, which are 2 of the 3 things above.
So when the next multiplication request comes in from your leaders, check 3 things before approving it.
First, go and see with your own eyes. If everything you know about that group came from a report, you do not know yet whether it is ready.
Then sit down with the leader. The plan already says who will take the new group; what it does not say is whether the leader has been walking with that person.
And look at the split in the multiplication plan, not at whether the numbers came out similar, but at whether the current group and the new one are both left with a strong core.
If the answer is no, the group is not ready. It is full. And what you do with a full group is not divide it, it is prepare someone to lead.
The number tells you the group grew. The visit tells you whether it is ready.
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References
(2014). Factors that Fuel Small Group Growth. Christian Education Journal, 11(1), 134 to 151. 1,140 small group leaders in 47 churches in the United States. Group size is not among the variables tested. restricted access
(2020). Dunbar's Number goes to Church. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 42(1), 63 to 76. The 15 for small groups is Keller's (2006), quoted by the authors; the layers come from Hill and Dunbar (2003). Read it in the Oxford repository open access
(2024). 5 Benefits of Limiting Group Size. Lifeway Research. Recommends 8 to 16 people, with 12 as the ideal, declaring as its basis the author's experience and the 12 disciples. No sample and no method. Read the article open access
This article is revised whenever a figure or a practice it cites changes. When that happens, the revision date appears next to the publication date.