Frank's Blog

Great small group leaders are always hunting for new ways to get the discussion going.  The link below is a free e-book with 40 different small group icebreakers! Here is an a example of one you can find in the e-book:

The aim of the game is to talk for one minute on a given subject. You announce the topic and a member of the group is randomly selected to speak for one minute. Use a pack of cards to randomly select i.e. person who draws the lowest number. Choose subjects to stimulate the imagination and which may be amusing. Put a stopwatch on each person to see how long they last before drying up! Subjects might include, my earliest memories, my favourite computer game, why beans are good for you, 10 things you can do with potatoes, Alligator wrestling, pre-millennialism (no, not really!)

Click here to download the e-book.

The free e-book is written by Grahame Knox.  Grahame lives in the UK and has been serving as a Christian youth worker and trainer for 27 years.  You can read more about his youth work at his blog, Insight.

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Dave Treat has posted the video highlights from each of the main sessions.  Here are links to each so take a look to get a feel for the great speakers at this year's conference:

Session 1 - John Burke

Session 2 - Mark Batterson and Heather Zemple

Session 3 - Will Miller

Session 4 - Bill Donahue

Session 5 - Miles McPherson

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Miles McPherson - How Community Transforms

Five things we need to do to as leaders to create transformational community:

1 - We have to redefine our evangelistic starting point as God's response to a broken world.

The gospel is a person - Jesus! God not only wants an experience with you. He wants you to share this to the world.
Exodus 3:6-10 Our communities are crying out. The church must respond to the cry of the people in the community. We need to first LISTEN to the cry.

2 - Identify God's response to the brokenness of your own life.

What is your God experience? What is God doing in your life? Surely, you (I) are not fixed. Surely, God is still working on you. Small group leaders are not fixed and perfect.
As leaders, are we transparent to our groups?

3 - Identify and love the brokenness in your church.

Our groups are breeding grounds for helping people through their brokenness.

4 - Identify and love the brokenness in your community.

We need to find the people in our communities and listen to the tears.
What is going on within a 10 mile radius of our church? Where is the brokenness? We need to take Christ's compassion out to the community - bars, strip clubs, adult book stores, women's centers, jail, ....
Let me go to the bar and drive people home who are drunk.
The community wants this interaction, they just don't know how to initiate it.

5 - Re-establish your evangelism priority.

It is a non-negotiable that you love your neighbor.
God created the church for the people who aren't in it yet. (We turn it into a country club.)
God wants to bless us so that we have overflow to give away.
STOP, LISTEN, and GO!
Don't waste the opportunity to turn people into a Jesus follower (not a Christian).
Keeping it to yourself will kill your ministry or your small group.
Take a risk!

Session Notes - Jon Stolpe

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Bill Donahue - Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time

Jon Stolpe took notes for me again during this session...

Life puts us in challenging and difficult situations that force us to make a decision.
There are times where we don't always make the best decision - despite our best strategies, ideas, and intentions.

Sometimes we make decisions out of a desire to satisfy our egos. We exchange expedience for wisdom - convenience for conviction.
What do you do when a good idea goes bad? When something we work hard on fails? How do we learn from failure in our ministry?
Reasons for failure:
1. An obsession with vision while ignoring reality.
2. Implementing a strategy without building an infrastructure.
3. Empowering leaders without developing them.
We need to mobilize every resource possible to support, shepherd, and enable our leaders.
4. Launching groups that never learn to be in community.
We need to help people in Relationship 101. People are self centered and don't naturally know how to relate.
How do you recover from these failures? Is there hope?
How you respond to failure really matters.
- We need to own up to our mistakes, and we need to say that we're sorry when we mess up. "I'm sorry, I made a mistake."
- We need to forgive ourselves.
- We need to remember that there is hope. God can redeem our failures. (Just look at the Bible-a story of failure redeemed.)
- We need to cling to Christ - the anchor of our soul.
Our job is to be make sure that people know that there is hope. We need hope, so we can pass it along to those in our community.
Do you have hope? Do I have hope? Where/who do you place your hope in? Hope can change the world. We have Christ to hang on to!
Great session!

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Finding and Launching New Leaders - Dave Treat

Workshop Goal - Learn to use a leadership assessment tool that will identify the readiness of each potential leader in your ministry and will clarify different training paths to help them move toward leadership.

Define - What do we want to reproduce?
- The reproducible life. "Follow me." I Corinthians 11:1
- What is the role of the Small Group Leader? What do we want to see happen in our groups?
- Leading vs. facilitating. A leader facilitates in a direction to take the group somewhere.
- Exercise: Skill or Maturity?
Has a servant's heart? Maturity
Has personal integrity? Maturity
Can plan a meeting? Skill
Has spiritual passion? Maturity
Can guide a discussion? Skill
Social intelligence? Skill

Spot - How do you spot your best candidates?
- Reproducible traits are observable. "We have heard." "We have seen."
- Harvest "low-hanging fruit". Men and women who are "ready" to lead. Look for traits you want to reproduce (maturity, skills). Pizza principle - see who leads naturally.
- Nurture your saplings. People with potential. FAT people - faithful, available, teachable.
- Create opportunities to spot potential leaders. Announcements. Strategic events. Ask.
- Land Mines:
- Those who think they're leaders.
- Those with personal agendas.
- Those who can lead elsewhere but are spiritually immature.
- Those who are unknown. (Are they currently in a small group?)
- HARVEST: Who do I know who might be a small group leader?
- NURTURE: Who do I know who with some help could be a small group leader?

Assess - What do they need to lead?
- Leadership Assessment/Training Matrix (hopefully I can post a diagram of this later)

Equip - Mature/Skilled: Vision
- The preferred future: changed lives. Potential leaders should be passionate about changed lives.
- Use resources.
- Make sure your goals agree.
- Do they get it?
Equip - Growing/Unskilled: Apprentice
- 80% of candidates.
- OTJ (on the job training): Apprentice learns by leading.
- Mentor: spiritual maturity; group skills.
- Take your time, but don't overtrain.
Equip - Growing/Skilled: Disciple
- Short-term, intensive maturity building
- Planned and targeted spiritual growth
- Spiritual passion, servant hood, integrity
- Take your time: You can't microwave maturity.
Equip - Mature/Unskilled: Turbo
- Short-term, intensive skill training
- A small group of apprentices
- Take your time: Learn community in community
- Leaders train each other. Have leaders lead the group for each other. Have other leaders give HONEST feedback. This is healthy.
- Turbo Training:
- Weeks 1 and 2: Knowing each other (60 min.); Lecture/Q&A - Basic META (60 min.); find out their story (light a candle and have them talk until the candle goes out).
- Weeks 3+: Leader of the day (rotate) (45 min.); debrief (15 min.); lecture/Q&A (60 min.); read Leading Life-Changing Small Groups.

Launch
- Take your time.
- Preparation vs. control
- Strategy depends on coaching resources
- You are not the Donald.

Terms:
- Apprentice - one who is learning to lead by leading.
- Turbo - a small group made entirely of apprentices.
- Coach - a leader of small group leaders.

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