Primary Purposes of Small Groups
To justify the hard work that is required to establish and to maintain small groups, and to trust their inevitable impact on the congregation, it is important to understand the purposes that small groups serve.
Face-to-face interaction
For Jesus, the principle governing all relationships was love. That love was personal -- person forgiving person, enemies reconciling, neighbors providing succor, parents and children finding oneness. Out of that love, people served and sacrificed.
In our relatively anonymous society, with "virtual relationships" often substituting for personal interaction, the Christian small group serves a vital purpose that is somewhat new to religious life, namerly, enabling people to have non-competitive and value-centered face-to-face interaction.
Locus of belonging within larger body
Jesus didn't live to see the day of a large fellowship. Other than two mass feedings, his time was spent with a small entourage (12 named male disciples, several named female disciples, and several dozen others) who traveled about with him and occasionally went out to serve.
Their lives together appear to have been informal and not governed by any agenda or timetable. Jesus went where he went, and they went with him.
The Twelve had a special relationship with each other, as did other men and women following Jesus. They were a model, or paradigm, of what Jesus envisioned for all of his followers. The point wasn't their unique or elite status, but what they gave up in order to follow Jesus, namely, careers, families, homes, wealth and safety.
In the days after Pentecost, the apostles tried to maintain this way of being: meeting in homes, sharing property, with a focus on being together and worshiping God.
Help members learn to live in community
To speak in generalizations -- to which there are always exceptions -- modern American adults have little community in their lives. Other than workgroups -- a shifting population, often competitive -- and nuclear family, they rarely spend significant time with other people.
Their relationships tend to be functional, not personal; episodic, not continuous; and to have self-defined and largely self-serving purposes.
Christian community offers a potent answer to this lack of community. But it will need to be learned, almost from scratch. Small groups are the setting where people will learn basic lessons, such as:
- how to interact frequently and continuously with people other than family;
- how to adapt to group norms and purposes without sacrificing personal integrity;
- how to listen to other people and to share oneself;
- how to compromise, to resolve conflict, to reach consensus;
- how to value being, as well as doing; and self-sacrificial love, as well as role-defined function.
Give and receive care
As stoic as we are about getting along alone, we ache for the care that can only be given by another person. Our marriages and partnerships cannot bear the full burden of providing such care. We wear each other out.
In a Christian small group, participants can tell their stories, share their aspirations and fears, seek specific help in crises, and relax into the unqualified love of people who are just glad to see them.
Even more than receiving such care is the joy of giving it. Dying to self truly is our pathway to life.
See God at work
It is one thing to confess Jesus as Lord and to accept his statement that "God is love." It is quite another to see that Lordship and love actually happening in one's presence. It's the foundational principle of an incarnational faith. God is a being who can be seen and known, perhaps imperfectly and yet sufficiently to warrant devotion.
A small Christian group is a place where one take the risk of living as Jesus wanted us to live and, in the process, see the one whom Jesus called "Father."
Dare transformation of life
Jesus said that God was "making all things new." Eventually, that becomes personal: one's own life being transformed.
Our resistance to such transformation is substantial:
- Fear of losing face or being judged wrong
- Loss of status, privilege
- Loss of certainties that have led one to feel safe
- Needing to examine one's life and to accept responsibility for expressions of will
- Needing to accept one's flaws, limitations and failures
In most settings of our lives, the cost of transformation is too high. Small groups provide a safe, accepting, non-judgmental and intimate place where the risks can be undertaken.
