North Perth’s Small Group Journey
Over the last 3 years, the North Perth Church has had a strategy that comprises of three key areas of focus with two pillars supporting them.
The first one what we call social events. These social events are usually run at a park under the name “Fun at the Park”. We just rock up, have some fun activities for kids and serve the community a free meal and drink. The purpose for these is to connect with our community and hopefully invite them to the next stage of our discipleship process, which is our small groups.
The second stage of our strategy is our small group ministry. We run the groups in seasons, using school terms currently. What that means is that groups only run for about 12 weeks or so and they either cease or take a break to relaunch in the next season. The criteria we have in defining small groups is deliberately simple:
NUMBERS: It must have at least three people with at least one individual not related to the other two.
SPIRITUALITY: Prayer or some spiritual aspect should be incorporated regardless of the type of group that it is.
REGULARITY: Meet at least every fortnight (as much as possible).
At the moment, we are on our 6th session and we have about 20 small groups with six of those being our regular Sabbath School groups for the adults that meet on sabbath morning. We have about 90-100 members of our church that have signed up in a small group.
While we still hope to achieve 100% of our worship attendees involved in small groups, we are grateful that we have seen a steady growth in small group participation. When we started two years ago, we only managed to sign up 30% of our church in small groups.
As I reflect on what has helped in our journey, I would put it down to a couple key reasons.
Sign up process: What we found that worked well is to plan a Sabbath service that is dedicated for signing up at church with the group leaders having set up their tables. That way people can wander around and talk to the leaders and have that personal connection to the leader and sign up on the spot.
Keep talking about it: We found that like anything, small groups are things you will have to keep talking about and keep tinkering at. You have to stay on it.
Varied types of groups: Most of the small groups we run have an element of fun. We seem to have more people sign up in our activity/hobby based groups more than study groups. This could be because folks find their spiritual tank filled from Sabbath School and they are keen to have more fun within the small group context.
We know that we have a long way to go and we are still learning. But this is a brief summary of our journey so far. Keep us lifted in prayer.
