Posted by Matt Harrell on February 11th, 2010 
This week Pastor Geoff Surratt, over on his personal blog started rocking the boat with his multi-part post entitled “Why Small Groups Don’t Work”. Catchy enough title to bring plenty of conversation. Grab a cup a coffee before you settle in. Geoff spent plenty of time framing up and delivering his argument that essentially says that the “missing link in church small groups” is a “driving missional focus”. Cool. Well I have zero authority to speak to the theological implications of the current “dilemma” with small groups in the church (if there even is one) but if they are broken, how can technology assist in fixing it?
First off I’d like to point out the obvious. Technology made this discussion possible. If the church is due for a change in small groups then my guess is that it would be delayed several more years if it wasn’t for the internet and the various platforms that connect so many church leaders so effortlessly. I’m sure Geoff’s thoughts had been bubbling up and forming for several months but in a matter of hours if not minutes, he was able to publish his thoughts to thousands and spark a very awesome discussion. But onto the real point of this post
How are you using technology for your small groups?
Why are you using technology for your small groups? In what capacity does it help? For example, we’ve had requests before to add attendance tracking to MemberHub to help small group leaders report attendance to their “small group coach”. I didn’t even know that sort of thing happened in small group ministries.
Help us technology folks out by providing your insight into where YOU think small groups are heading and how technology can help make them a powerful tool in the Kingdom.
For churches that have a significant groups emphasis communication is key, and technology can help us communicate efficiently if we are equiped with the right tools. The challenge is having a tool that is cusomizable. A tool where the user can choose what communication methods are the most effective to reach them and there are lots of reasons this is needed in group ministry and how in imacts the church. Here are a few I came up with:
*Help the big feel small – Technology can help people connect in group life for the first time and help a big church feel small and intimate.
* Pastoral care – group ministry is the front line of pastoral care in the church. Technology can aid in getting the word out so people recieve the care they need.
* Volunteer network – I can't count how many times we have utilized our small ministry to rally the troops to get a job done. We would not have been able to staff our kids program when we experimented with our Saturday night service if it weren't for entire small groups volunteering to serve on Saturday nights together. Technology can aid us in getting high priority communication out to engage our groups in the life of our community and congregation.
Excellent Frank! I couldn't agree more. We've been talking about the importance of effective communication over here for a while (hence the biggest link in the tag cloud off to the right). Customizable….cool. Customizable but user-friendly… Thanks Frank for dropping your thoughts here.
Let's start with a problem: Need for more well-trained & gifted small group Bible teachers.
How can technology help? This idea came out of a brainstorming session with a local church.
Put the main Bible teacher at the church. The Bible study message is broadcast via Internet to each home. Moderators (easier to recruit and train than teachers) lead discussions at home. Groups come back together online for wrap-up with main teacher, live Q&A, and chat.
The job of IT is to help the Church achieve it's mission & to help leaders get things done more effectively.
Interesting Gordon. So it's all about being remote in this case. I know a church that uses video for all small group discipleship. Each group sees the same video and has the same questions. Video is disseminated through the Discussions feature in each small group hub in Memberhub. We're missing the live chat part obviously. I know you're all about the live media. Thanks!
Re: Video for all small group discipleship
I've been a part of groups that have done this. It's been good. But the leaders in these instances have been facilitators, thus no interaction, Q&A with the teacher. That's the missing piece that technology can make happen.
Thanks for the link Matt, interesting topic. At Seacoast we use technology in several ways with our existing small groups. All of our leadership training is done online, we utilize Facebook for much of our communication and now we are starting use more specialized social networking tools.
Very cool Geoff, thanks for stopping by :). "Specialized social networking tools" in addition to Facebook. Cool. A lot of churches are starting to realize that communicating with members through Facebook is not as effective as one would think.
Hey! This is very nice post i ever read || Thanks.
Hey Matt!
Such an interesting topic. I would love to see a form of attendance tracking for small groups. We have about 1500 people in our church. Having an attendance record/tracking would be so helpful; maybe in a form of magnetized card that we can swipe and have that info put into our MemberHub database. Or just a place where the admin can check off who came/ who didnt.