Why a small group church multiplies less after a few years Multiplications go on. And the small group vision, how does it reach the new leaders?

With whom is the small group vision of a small group church born?

With one person! The small group vision is born in the heart of the senior pastor. It is the direction God gives him on how to lead that church.

That is why it is not a method the church adopts. It is a conviction, and it is what makes each person, each ministry and each small group leader walk in the same direction and speak the same language.

Back at the beginning, it was that vision that made the senior pastor preach, Sunday after Sunday, that every member stops being a spectator at the service and becomes someone who makes new disciples.

He preached until the whole church held in its heart that the vision is not a growth strategy. It is the fulfilment of a calling from Jesus.

That is where what the church calls a healthy small group comes from. In the church of the opening scene, a healthy small group is a group that makes new disciples, and not only a close group. Hold on to that, because it is what will get lost along the way.

The small group vision of each church is grounded in conviction of faith, biblical principles and discernment about the calling of the local church.

When the time came to train the first small group leaders, the pastor himself taught the classes. The first class of leader training received the small group vision first hand.

And it was the same vision that made that pastor lead a small group at that stage and care personally for each leader of the others. He preached, taught the classes and supervised. Everything came from the same person.

At the beginning, between the pastor who passed on the vision and those who led the small groups there was nobody.

How do the intermediaries of the small group vision appear?

At each stage of growth of a small group church, one more person appears between the senior pastor and the small group leader.

The first stage comes when the senior pastor can no longer care for all the leaders. Small group supervisors appear, and that is when the vision starts being passed on by other people.

The next stage comes when there are many supervisors, and some of them become coordinators. The coordinators keep up with the supervisors and walk alongside them.

In most churches, those first coordinators were the first supervisors, and they received the vision straight from the pastor. And they are the ones who raise new supervisors, who are almost always leaders who have already multiplied small groups a few times.

Later, it is normal for the senior pastor to no longer be able to lead the training of new leaders. So he hands the training to a team, and the new leaders go through the course receiving the content from other people.

And before any course, the new leader has already been part of a small group. Much of what he understands a small group to be, he learned there, from the leader who cared for him.

It is usually at this stage that the passing on of the small group vision starts to show small distortions.

A small group multiplies and gives rise to another. Later that other one multiplies and gives rise to one more. Each of those times is a multiplication cycle.

In most small group churches, the cycle lasts about a year, which is the time a group takes to mature.

It is the multiplication cycles that set the stages of growth. That is why none of these stages appears all at once. Each one takes a few cycles of small group multiplication in the church.

Notice that each of these changes is necessary. The senior pastor cannot stay side by side with a structure of 50, 100, 200 small groups, and the training of new small group leaders needs more teachers.

But the reality becomes a different one: the leader who takes on a small group has not received the whole vision from the senior pastor, and often neither have the new supervisors. Both received it from someone who learned it from someone, who received the small group vision from the pastor.

What is lost each time the vision is passed on?

With each multiplication cycle, a part of the vision the pastor passed on starts to get lost along the way. But what is lost does not stay empty.

The leader on the receiving end fills in the missing part with the idea of a healthy small group he already carried.

And that idea comes, mainly, from the group he used to attend. But that group may not have been a healthy small group according to the vision the senior pastor conceived.

So what reaches the leader is not a weak version of the senior pastor’s vision. It is the idea the leader already had of a good small group.

Look back at the opening of the article. The leader says the group is good, but the church preaches a healthy small group. It looks like the same thing, but it may not be.

The loss of content at each transmission has already been measured, and the number is worse than it looks.

Now think about the small group supervision structure of your church. From the network, through the coordinators and the supervisors, whatever each level is called in your church, down to the leaders who will take on a group this year.

Through how many people will the small group vision be passed on before it reaches those new leaders?

A few multiplication cycles later, what is left is not the pastor’s vision. It is the expectation of whoever told it.

It is worth stating the limit of the two studies. Neither was done in a church. They were done in a laboratory, with short stories and simple figures.

Even so, what the studies measure is a chain of transmission, with people telling the same thing to one another. And the supervision structure of your church works like that.

Does the small group vision depend on the senior pastor alone?

No. It also depends on the people who support him in the church, whether associate pastors, teachers, coordinators or small group supervisors.

But the senior pastor does not leave the stage. He keeps reaching, intentionally, the people who pass on the small group vision. Mainly from the pulpit, but without giving up regular meetings with his team.

At the beginning, the pastor preached the vision Sunday after Sunday. Today he keeps preaching it, often and intentionally.

It is in the Sunday sermon that the senior pastor restates the foundations of the small group vision. The things that cannot be lost over the multiplication cycles.

At the beginning, the pastor taught the first class in person. Today the classes belong to a team. So the vision needs to be whole in whoever teaches, and he is the one who checks that.

At the beginning, the pastor cared for each small group leader. Today he keeps caring, but mainly for those who are linked directly to him in the structure of the church.

And here is the part that tends to get lost. When the first supervisors were raised, the pastor cared for them and stayed close to the leaders. He did not disappear.

That pattern goes down through the structure. The coordinator cares for the supervisors and stays close to the leaders. The supervisor cares for the leaders and stays close to the small groups. Each one cares for whoever is right below, and stays close to the next level.

There is a passage in the Bible about a vision that did not reach the next generation.

“The people served the LORD throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the LORD had done for Israel” (Judges 2:7, NIV).

And what came next:

“After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel” (Judges 2:10, NIV).

Joshua did not fail. But the next generation was not reached up close by those who had seen.

The senior pastor needs to be sure that everyone on his team has the small group vision burning in their heart.

Here it is worth saying something that is hard to find out there: the transition to the small group vision never ends.

It is not a stage the church goes through and finishes. New leaders arrive every year. People from another church become members and bring another idea of a small group in their luggage.

The vision needs to keep being passed on all the time. Only the strategy for doing it changes from church to church. The principle does not change.

At the start of implementing the small group vision, the vision arrives whole because there is nobody in between. After a few multiplication cycles, it runs the risk of arriving different from what it should be.

The people the senior pastor reaches up close are the ones who today do the work that used to be his. It is through them that the vision reaches, or fails to reach, those who lead.

Is a church multiplying fewer small groups natural, or a failure in passing on the small group vision?

It can be both, and the difference between them changes what you do on Monday. Part of what happens belongs to God and is not in your hands.

The practical part is in your hands: the structure, the training of leaders and supervisors, the passing on of the small group vision. As in the parable of the talents, God hands you the vision and does not expect you to bury it.

So far, this article has answered why a small group church multiplies less after a few years. What is missing is the question only you can answer: why is your church multiplying less?

Go back to the report in the opening scene. Almost half of the small groups are more than two years old. The number shows something has stalled, but it does not say whether it is God’s timing or a vision that did not arrive. That part is not in the report.

Multiplication is grace. It is a gift from God to your ministry and to the life of a leader. It is not the fruit of human effort. We have covered that in Why your small group church is not growing.

And if it is grace, it may be that God is holding it back. When that happens, it is out of kindness: something needs to be set right first, in the church or in the life of whoever leads.

In that case nothing is wrong, and looking for blame is looking for what does not exist.

But there is the other half: the practical part, which is in the hands of the senior pastor and his support team.

That half is not handed to God before it has been dealt with. Analyse, seek understanding, study, find a reporting system built for small group churches. Burying what was entrusted was never a sign of faith.

So the honest answer to this section’s question does not start with a conclusion. It starts with a check.

Is the vision arriving clearly in those who lead? Do the leaders understand what your church considers a healthy small group? Are they leading with purpose or on autopilot?

If the answers are yes, and multiplication is still lower than it once was, glory to God. It is his timing, and his timing is not to be rushed.

If you cannot answer, that is where to start. And you can find out in a conversation.

How do you know whether the small group vision is being passed on well?

In a conversation. Ask the leader what he thinks of a real situation in his small group, and compare the answer with the small group vision of your church. It is in the answer that the way the leader thinks shows.

The situation is in the small group report. It may be few visitors in recent months, members missing several meetings in a row, a group that has been full for a long time. Pick one that touches a non-negotiable value of your church’s vision.

If he sees the same as you and explains why he has not acted yet, the vision arrived. If he looks at the same situation and sees something else, the vision that arrived was a different one.

And he is not wrong for that: he is being faithful to what he learned.

The answer is not about the leader. It is about how your church is passing on the vision.

It is the same question the leader in the opening scene answered without anyone asking.

Small group multiplication is grace. But you also cannot let the small group vision arrive broken in those who take on a leadership role in your church.