If you got from my first point that small groups can’t be the place to find relational intimacy, then I expressed myself badly, because that was definitely not what I was saying. Of course small groups are the main place to find that. All of the lasting relationships I mentioned came out of small groups. What I said (or meant) was that if you get or witness no sense of relationship, or at least hint of one, as you mix with the larger group, it’s unlikely that you’re going to see much more of it when you enter a small group from the same crowd. I was trying to be concise, but I should have made it clear that I was working backward, as it were, off my point #4. When the large group consists mainly of people who don’t really have a sense of community of their own, and some of them decide that, “Okay, we’re going to have a small group,” what often results (in my experience) is a forced, over-programmed routine that people quickly tire of because of the lack of real life in that group. I may have been overinterpreting things from my own observations, but I just don’t think the “feel” of a large group should be so radically different when said group is made up of a lot of people from healthy small groups. (This may indeed break down at a certain size, certainly at the megachurch level. Still, the one semi-megachurch I tried unsuccesfully to connect with – 12,000 members – had a very detached feel and not much in the way of small groups either.)

To answer your question, “If we can’t commit to a small group, then what can we commit to?”, we can commit the the relationships formed in the group, regardless of what eventually happens to the group as a structured activity. There are seasons for everything, and I don’t believe that the prime directive of a group should be the maintenance of the group per se, it should be the forming of relationships. If God calls members of a group to something different after a few years, but the relationships are still strong and lasting, how is that a failure? And who’s to say they won’t do something (relationally) bigger and better somewhere down the road? There may be a bit of my own “programmaphobia” in this, but I believe we should let God be God, and not assume that every group we form can only be a success if it stays in that form permanently.

I can very easily see that happening. A very good friend of mine was in a church where small groups were used in the method you mentioned. The small group leaders (he was one) had to fill out attendance reports and reports on what was discussed, prayed for, and forward them to the small groups pastor and to mention ‘dissenting opinions’ and who started it.. Plus, the small group was really a ‘re-hashing’ of the Sunday Sermon as to how did you apply it in your life that week.

Even though I never experienced this in the many small groups I mentioned in my previous post, I had heard stories of small groups in that church (through some of my friends) where the leaders were known to fall head-over-heels with the ‘cutting edge anointings’, the ‘next level spirituality’ and the ‘new teachings divinely revealed to them by God’ that the small groups became places where small group leaders not properly held accountable brought these teachings into the small group settings and caused some bad teachings and practices to take place and come forth and a giant mess to clean up and correct.