My First Small Group Leader Focus Group

We’ve been doing Orange for about 2 years and made the transition to small groups 5 years ago. Growing up in the traditional children’s church model of Sunday School and Large group, it has been an uphill battle understanding what it takes to lead a quality small group that focuses on relationship over content and teach others to do the same.

One of the hardest principles of Lead Small is Partner with Parents. I know it’s a great idea, and I use the tools that 252 provides for take homes, but I wasn’t confident that my SGL’s were connecting with their few or their parents outside of Sunday morning.

One of the things I love about Weekly is their weekly to do lists. I don’t do everything on the list, but it’s great to get some ideas. Recently, they listed a small group leader focus group. I loved all the questions and how it gave me a plan to get a pulse on what my small group leaders were thinking.

I’ve learned that unless you put something on the calendar it won’t happen, so I found a good date and made a Facebook event in our SGL leader group.

Once the day arrived, I had my questions and focus points from what Weekly provided and most of my SGL’s showed up. I provided some coffee and set the tone for the meeting.

Before I knew it, we were having a great conversation about how to do small group better. I focused on listening to their needs and asking for solutions. SGL’s were sharing ideas with each other and encouraging one another.

We didn’t stick to one particular category of questions but that was ok. Many of my SGL’s were relatively new and had some great questions. We decided to make some changes for them to better connect. First, they wanted a monthly roster of their few with addresses and birthdays. They were super excited about the postcards Weekly provides and wanted to use them. Second, we’ve had some turnover so they all agreed to reach out to their few they haven’t seen in at least three weeks with either a postcard or a phone call. Lastly, they weren’t connecting with parents. Most of my SGL’s didn’t know who their few’s parents were. So, we decided to instead of dismissing our kids into our large group space to play and wait for parents to show up, we invited the parents to go to our small groups and pick them up. We still checked security tags at the door, and I used my Large Group Host team to walk parents to all the different classrooms. We’ve only done it for one week, but we’ve received positive feedback.

I hated to end the conversation, but our time was up. I prayed over them and our small groups and we dismissed. I’m looking forward to seeing how our SGL’s use the 5 principles of Lead Small specifically how they connect with their few and their parents.