Relationships are an essential part of the Christian life.  To follow Jesus and his teachings means we live in community with God, and community with others.  The challenge we face in our culture is the busyness it creates in people's lives. The very people that we are called to ministered to and I believe social media is a tool we can leverage to enhance our relationships. So here are three ways you may wa ...

Sometimes in small group world we get caught up in the present. We think about how to enhance my group situation this week. How do I find a better study, how do I encourage my group to share deeply, or how can we support others through stress in life. However, as leaders we must also be thinking about the future. In order to have our churches remain culturally relevant we must understand the social tools th ...

There are lots of tools out there to help you manage a growing small group ministry but few combine two essential components - affordable and effective.  I recently connected with Matt Harrell over at MemberHub and it seems they have a solution that group leaders and pastors should consider.  They even have a free 30 day trial for you to testdrive, but I wanted to ask him two key questions to help us unders ...

If your small group is doing an extended study together a blog can be helpful in keeping you connected.  Our church is currently doing a sermon series through the book of Proverbs and we have challenged the church to read a chapter per day and do some memorization through the process.  One of our Home Teams (small groups) is blogging through each chapter and using the blog to stay communicate through the da ...

How do you measure the progress of a small group ministry? How do you know if you, as a champion for small groups in your church, are accomplishing your goals? First, you actually have to have them! Kevin Stone,  Executive Pastor at Christ's Church of the Valley (near Philadelphia), is a big fan of the S.M.A.R.T. method. Goals must be ...

In my previous posts on this topic we covered Small Groups 2.0 for social groups and traditional (study) small groups. In this post I want to cover task groups. ...

My latest series of posts is all about how social networking tools on the internet can enhance our small group ministry. My last post shared how our social groups use blogging as a tool but it doesn’t end there! ...

Does your small group ministry take advantage of all that the web has to offer? Are you utilizing all of the functionality of Web 2.0? In order for us to dig deeper into how the web can enhance your small group ministry experience we first should define what Web 2.0 is.  Here is how Wikipedia defines it: ...