From: jmrg9881@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Jon Reid)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Cell Group Churches (3 of 3)
Date: 5 Sep 92 21:19:28 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana

Bruce, thanks for your post.  A few comments off the top of my head,
specifically in regard to what my church is doing:

First, I notice you using the words "organization" and "gimmick".  Our senior
pastor, Happy Leman (an interesting and significant name), has stressed again
and again that becoming a cell group church means, above all, a change in
values to a servant lifestyle more than a mere change in structure.  He lists
what the pastoral staff currently sees as the "minimal components needed to
implement the entire Cell Based Strategy" to be Structure, Values, Context,
Relational Skills, Prayer, and the Holy Spirit.

I won't go into each of these at the moment, but in explaining structure, he
says, "The correct structure will not make the Small Group Church happen, but
the wrong structure could keep it from happening.  Thus we do need to look at
our structures and make sure they are compatible with the direction we are
heading.  By structure I mean the way we make decisions, allow ministry
candidates to rise to their potential, and transfer ownership of the entire
congregation."

One of the key principles of leadership in our church is that we don't go
around appointing people to positions and expect them to fulfill the duties of
those positions.  Rather, we look for people who are *already* "doing the
stuff".  In _Where Do We Go From Here?_, Ralph Neighbour writes, "These men
earned their positions by demonstrating the anointing of God on their
equipping ministries."  The focus is on anointing and effectiveness in being
servants, not on titles, positions, and power.

With that said, a few comments on leadership:  You say, "novice beware", but
being a small group leader is not huge undertaking, and the small group
coordinators, zone pastors, and senior pastor are in no way novices.  In fact,
though we avoid the terminology, it is the small group coordinators and not
the small group leaders that we identify as "elders".

The reason I say that being a small group leader is not a huge undertaking is
this:  In the past, we have relied on extraordinary people to be small group
leaders.  The fact is that such people are almost impossible to find in large
enough quantities.  After reading _The E Myth_ by Michael Gerber, our pastor
decided that we need an extra-ordinary strategy in which the "average person"
can succeed.

The difficulty in the strategy we are adopting is not in finding leaders, but
in bringing about a total life-style change, not just in the pastors, not just
in the leaders, but in our entire church of 1000 people.  We are committing
ourselves to a more radical understanding of Christian life.  We're tired of
"sitting and soaking" on Sunday mornings, an emphasis on programs and
specialists to implement them, "attendance" and "participation" being all that
is expected of people, transmission of information instead of changing of
values, church growth through migration instead of conversion, the lost never
really being reached... I could go on...

In a body where the emphasis is on people and not programs, where every
believer is equipped to do the work of the ministry, where the norm for
Christian life is "how you serve" and not "what you know", where people
prevail in prayer for the lost with whom they are building true relationships,
where intimacy with God is not just for the "super-spiritual", where there is
true community... in such a body, it should not be hard to find qualified
small group leaders. And until we become such a body, we cannot call ourselves
a Small Group Church.

This is not naive idealism.  It it a new paradigm that has been demonstrated
to be feasible, to be real.  Cell group churches are taking off around the
world.

-- 
Jon Reid    j-reid@uiuc.edu    GEnie: THE.REIDS
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."