3 Reasons Your Student Ministry MUST Have Small Groups
I’m encouraged by the growth and popularity of small groups in student ministries among churches today. Apart from the teaching of God’s Word, small groups seem to me to be the catalyst for students growing in their faith.
A student pastor can stand before a group of students week after week and teach them the Bible, but its not until the students get in a small group, led by a trained and impassioned leader, that they start to really own and live what they have been hearing from the student pastor.
Unfortunately, many student ministries still don’t do small groups. Now, there are many different factors that contribute to this. Some people are limited by group size and/or availability of adult volunteers. But for others, there doesn’t seem to be any real roadblocks to introducing a small group strategy. For these folks, I’d like to offer three reasons why your student ministry really needs to have a small group strategy.
Jesus Did It
If you read through the Gospels you’ll find that Jesus spent most of His time with twelve men. (And even within the twelve, He had a group of three He was even more intentional with.) Jesus invested His time and energy into these guys, helping them own their faith and compelling them to ultimately change their world. Yes, Jesus spent some time among the sinners, the sick, and the outcast. He met people’s needs. But the majority of His time was spent teaching the Twelve. These small group of men would carry on His work when He left. Jesus knew the importance and effectiveness in investing time into a smaller group of people rather than ton of people.
It Is The Best Way To See Discipleship Happen
In the book The Greenhouse Project, Ric Garland says that one person can only effectively disciple five to six people. Even if you added a few people to Ric’s number, this is still a problem as the majority of youth ministries have more than six or eight students. If you’re still trying to teach your group of 20 or 30 by yourself, you’re not discipling as effectively as you could be. Consider recruiting adult volunteers and giving each one five-to-six students, encouraging and empowering them to invest their time and energy into discipling those students.
It Gets Adult Leaders Involved
If you take the last point I said seriously than that means you will need to have a team of adult leaders that you disciple first (they become your small group), then they will in turn disciple a group of students which becomes their small group. An effective student ministry depends on the student pastor building a team of adult leaders who invest in the students. If we want to see each student in our ministry reached, and watch them grow in their faith, we must make sure to get adults involved and to give them the training they need to invest in students’ lives.
Our student ministries are filled with students who desperately need to be challenged how to live out their faith.
If we don’t get them into small groups where they feel comfortable talking, sharing, and connecting with an adult, they may end up graduating our ministries in much the same way they came in.
Putting the time and effort into making small groups a part of your student ministry is worth it!
Austin McCann is currently a pastoral intern at Weymouth Community Church in Medina, OH. He enjoys reading, writing, playing basketball or golf, and working with students within the context of the local church. You can visit Austin’s personal blog at www.austinmccann.com.
Small Groups are one of the best things that we do in our ministry! The biggest win in our ministry has been other adults investing in the lives of our middle school students, and looking for ways to connect with them outside of the church. This has allowed our ministry to expand beyond me as the youth pastor.
As a 10+ year adult volunteer, small groups are the medium of how I disciple students. I’ve done it both ways, and small groups can’t be beat. Thankful for your heart for students, Adam. You headed to SYMC?
I’m not going to be able to go to SYMC this year. I’m really disappointed that I won’t be there. It would be cool to connect again.
Dang, man. I was putting a sort of mental list of “e-friends” together I was hoping to see. You were on the list:) Well, you’ll just have to find an excuse to head to Birmingham. Take care, Adam!
Adam, getting leaders involved is one of the big reasons I love small groups! It gives them chance to actually connect with the students and reach into their life. As you said, small groups also allows your ministry to go way beyond you as the student pastor.
There are many times that our small group leaders connect with the students in their group in ways that I would never be able to. I think that some youth leaders would have a problem with that, but I look at it as a win.
Especially if you have a large group. If you have a hundred or more kids, there’s no way you can relationally invest in many of them, much less all of them. Pushing the adult interaction down into small groups really enhances the quality of that relationship.
How does this look in your ministry?
How does a normal youth night go?
You preach, then kids split up into small groups? Or is it The opposite?
Or do you do small groups on a seperate night. Just curious.
Currently I don’t have my “own” student ministry. The student ministries I have worked would normally do teaching (preaching) than have the students go to their small groups for 20 min for discussion and feedback. I like this model because your not asking students and parents to give up another night during the week for small groups.
In our ministry I teach and then our students break up into groups to discuss what we just talked about. I work with middle school students, so a lot of times the first question has to be what did Adam talk about.
Our students have about 15-20 minutes to discuss and apply what we learned that night.
Our small groups also help us keep students from getting lost in the crowd. One of the last things that our small group leaders say every week is, “I look forward to seeing you next week.” This lets our students know that they are important and that we enjoy having them in our ministry.
Hey Anom,
Just to offer another perspective, our church has done it a few different ways over the years. We have done what used to be called a Master Teacher approach where one teacher teaches a large group and then we break into small groups to talk about the application of the lesson. So, in that model, maybe there is an ice-breaker for the large group, followed by a 20 minute or so “talk,” then 10-15 minutes in small groups.
I think many churches, when they do small groups, either do them in the place of a large group meeting (either mid-week, or Sunday morning), or in addition to. For the churches who do it in addition to a large group meeting, it is often a smaller group of students who have a little more buy-in.
That’s just a couple of examples. There are plenty of ways to do them. Hope this helps!
So true. Sometimes in large churches, even small groups become huge, and that especially hurts the kids who are more introverted. Those kids make up about thirty percent of the population, and they will be missed completely if small groups aren’t available.
Great point Alex. Thanks for stopping by the blog!
Ok, just curious, do you do icebreakers/games and an alter call?