The Power of 2 or 3

Neil Cole’s Church 3.0 has a number of ideas that might be considered radical in many churches, but his perspectives on the church have challenged me to evaluate how I “do church.” One point that stands out is his discussion of the need for small group discipleship. He argues that churches should be built around small groups of 2 or 3, which then build into larger groups of 10 to 12, and then up to larger groups into the hundreds. Often we try to build churches the opposite way. We start by pouring our resources into large groups, and then we work our way back down to the smaller groups, which are usually no smaller than 10 to 20 people.

As a pastor, I spend a lot of time focusing on the big group. Sermon preparation and worship planning take up large portions of my week. Most churches spend huge amounts of money, time, and resources on their large worship gatherings. Meanwhile, church staff members usually spend far less time overseeing, equipping, and growing the smaller groups in the church. While I don’t want to suggest that these large group times are unimportant, when I reflect on my own life, most of my sustained spiritual growth has come through a small group of believers, often less than 5 people. If growth is most likely to occur in small groups through mentoring and personal accountability, should we reevaluate how we spend our time, money, and resources as pastors, as church leaders, and as churches?

Most churches I have been involved in don’t have groups smaller than a Sunday School class. These classes usually have at least 10 people in them. Ten people is too many for mentoring and for the kind of intimate discipleship that is so crucial to Christian growth. As churches, we often assume that believers are discipling other believers in personal, intentional ways, but we rarely plan for these kind of relationships. The consequence is that Christians can find places to hide all over the church, even in groups as small as a Sunday School class. We can come to church week after week without baring our souls to our brothers and sisters, confessing our sins to one another, or praying together for the deepest longings of our hearts. Too often this means that we don’t grow as believers because we are never honest enough with a brother or sister to show them the hidden secrets in our hearts.

We desperately want our large group times of worship to grow. We want them to be attractive to non-church members, we want them to be Spirit-filled and passionate, and we want them to be creative and interactive times of worship, but perhaps we need to consider that our worship times will never be what God intended until our small-group discipleship times are intimate, personal, and life-changing. Perhaps we will never grow significantly in our corporate worship until we are growing through mentoring and intentional discipleship in far smaller groups than the 50 to 5,000 that gather for worship on Sunday morning.