Allen White and Jeremy Gant of One Ten Pictures share (in detail) about creating your own video-based curriculum.
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By Allen White
Nothing will accelerate your group launch faster than the right topic. When you choose a theme for an alignment series that is a common felt need in your congregation and your community, people will run to join groups. But, the reverse can also be true. Choosing the wrong topic will drive them away.
Several years ago, I was working with a church that started every year with a 21 day fast. They wanted to design a curriculum to support the fast. While I would never attempt to talk a church out of such a significant initiative, I did caution them that forming new groups might be a little challenging. On the bright side, the refreshments would be very easy. They started a handful of new groups for their members and had a great experience with their fast. But, they were far from involving the entire congregation.
Some topics are for more mature believers rather than for people in the community who may have never darkened the door of your church. Anything to do with money: budgeting, giving, generosity, capital campaigns, and so on are challenging to form groups around. While many people need help managing their finances, too many evangelists desiring $65 million jets have created a poor association between the church and money for most of the world. Don’t go there.
Other topics like evangelism, spiritual disciplines, and spiritual gifts are great for the congregation, but probably won’t draw much interest from the community. There are ways to promote these topics more indirectly.
Instead of creating an alignment series around a capital campaign, why not create a series around what the church is raising money for? If the church is taking new initiatives to help the poor or become a resource in the community, then these are the topics to promote. Maybe the church is investing in the next generation. People are very concerned about the world their children will grow up in. They can get behind the vision of the church to reach the community, and then they might even give.
Instead of creating curriculum to teach your people evangelism, why not produce a series that is evangelistic? Talk about the needs in the community. You could even include a presentation of the Gospel. You could do evangelism with the curriculum rather than teaching how to do evangelism. A series like All In focuses on the story of Jesus and offers the Gospel message.
There are ways to introduce mature topics to a broader group. But, the largest group launches come from topics that touch a nerve.
When you talk to your neighbors and others in your community, what are they concerned about? Many people struggle in their relationships, their marriages, and their parenting. These are great felt need topics which can reach a broad audience.
People also deal with anxiety, worry, and stress. Some feel like giving up or are lost in even successful careers. What will bring them meaning and hope? Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef who recently committed suicide once asked, “What do you do after your dreams have come true?” Even those who seem to have it all often feel a deep void. How can your series help them?
Of course, the granddaddy of all church-wide campaigns is The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren. Other series which have drawn in the community include Kerry Shooks’ One Month to Live, Live Like Your Dying, and Half Time by Bob Buford. I’ve worked with churches to produce series that deal with leaving a legacy, common fears, hope, or ambition that have helped some churches more than double their current numbers of groups. A couple of churches now have twice as many people in groups than they have in weekend attendance.
The best topic you can choose for a successful curriculum and group launch is the idea that your pastor is the most passionate about. Does he have a life message or dominate them he speaks about often? Does she have a clear direction on what the Fall series should be? The best topic is not necessarily the hottest topic to the church, but the hottest topic for your pastor.
Once you have that direction, you don’t have to start with a blank piece of paper. Most pastors have files full of sermons they’ve preached over the course of their ministries. There is no shortage of content. Why not research the pastor’s hot topic in past sermon files? You’ll be surprised what you come up with.
And, remember, you’re not creating the next Purpose-Driven Life! Your study may not make the bestseller list, but your pastor’s teaching on your video-based curriculum will be very popular with your congregation. What’s even better is that when your felt need topic draws in the friends, neighbors, and co-workers of your members into groups, they will be introduced to your pastor through the video curriculum. When these new folks are invited to church, they will feel like they already know your pastor from the videos!
Where are you headed this Fall? If you’re creating your own curriculum, I hope you’ve already started. If not, there are semi-custom offerings from allinsmallgroups.com and other sources that have scripts and study guides already written. The hard work is taken care of. Your pastor just needs to personalize the scripts and shoot the video. If push comes to shove, curriculum you purchase can also help you form new groups as long as your pastor is passionate about it.
The topic will make or break your next alignment. Where are you headed?
By Allen White
Easter is only 12 weeks away. Did I scare you?
Now, you may be one of those pastors who plans everything in advance. Good for you. But, you might be like the pastors at one church I served where Easter always seemed to take us by surprise. How many services? How do we promote? What is our theme? Who is leading worship? How can we get them back after Easter? If those are your questions, you are in good company.
Every pastor wants to see new faces on Easter Sunday, and maybe even a few faces that haven’t been seen for a while. But, once you get them to the service, how do you keep them? How can they be connected? How can new believers be effectively discipled? These are important questions. Let me offer three tips to connecting your Easter crowd.
Easter is the day when everyone who calls your church their home church shows up. Whether they are members, regular attenders or CEOs (Christmas and Easter only), Easter is the day they all come. This presents a unique opportunity for launching groups.
More than any other season, Easter is the time when everyone can hear the invitation for groups at the same time. While Christmas offers a similar opportunity, the end of December is not a great time to talk about the New Year. Your people just aren’t there yet. But, Easter gets everybody in the room and offers a window to start groups and get people to come back on the Sunday after Easter.
A few years ago, we created a video-based curriculum called Hope Rising for Eastside Christian Church, Anaheim, CA with Pastor Gene Appel. They handed out a copy of the study guide to everyone of the 7,000 people who attended Easter series. When it was all said and done, Eastside launched 460 groups for that series. Now you may not have 7,000 people, but you could have 65 percent of your people in groups like Gene did.
While some may have some misgivings about launching groups toward the end of the school year, the reality is when you have everybody present for Easter, you really can’t pass up that opportunity. If you offer these groups a next step, even if it’s in the Fall, as many as 80 percent will take you up on the offer.
I served one pastor who used to end the Easter services by saying, “And, if I don’t see you in the near future, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas.” We can have a bad attitude toward our “Christmas and Easter Only” crowd, but let’s not rule them out just yet.
When you think about the people who occasionally or rarely attend your services, wouldn’t you like to get them more engaged? Now think about this, who are their friends? Most likely they have far more friends outside of the church than inside the church. That’s great news for starting small groups. If you invite them to do a study with their friends, you can begin reaching people who’ve barely darkened the door of your church. Rather than inviting your CEO’s to join groups with church people, offer them a way to connect with their unchurched friends and do something intentionally to grow spiritually. The group experience will lead them to the worship experience.
At Harvest Church in Byron, GA, Pastors Jim and Jennifer Cowart used a strategy they called “Grab, Gather, and Grow.” The idea was to grab an easy-to-use curriculum, gather with a group of friends, and grow spiritually. Their congregation of 2,500 took them up on it. Some 5,000 or so friends were gathered for these groups. Many of those friends started attending the weekend services as well.
So often we think of groups as an assimilation strategy or discipleship training, but groups are very effective in reaching out to others in the community who may not have a connection to the church, but do have a connection to someone in your church.
By giving your members, and even your CEO’s, permission and opportunity to form a group with their friends, more people could end up in groups than in your services. Groups can become an entry point to your church.
The key to launching groups at both Eastside and Harvest was the senior pastors. At both churches, the senior pastor was the spokesperson for groups. Not only that, the senior pastor was the teacher on the curriculum. While there is a lot to unpack in those two concepts think about this: if your people aren’t connected to each other, the reason they attend your church is because of your senior pastor. They enjoy the pastor’s style, teaching, and even the jokes. (One word of caution: don’t mention this to your worship pastor, it will break his heart.)
If your church creates curriculum based on your pastor’s teaching, you’re just giving your people more of what they already want. There are a variety of ways to do this. You could pay someone tens of thousands of dollars to do this for you. If you’re interested in that, I could recommend someone. But, you could also map out your own series, shoot the video, edit the video, write the study guide, design the study guide, and then duplicate everything yourself. That may sound daunting, but some churches are producing curriculum with an iPhone. A third way is to add your pastors teaching to a series that has already been created like All In.
However, you create your video-based curriculum, that teaching along with your pastors invitation on Easter Sunday will create more groups than you can imagine. While you’re in the process of calculating how many lilies and eggs your church will need, don’t miss out on the opportunity to launch groups off of Easter. Not only will unchurched people participate, but the Sunday after Easter won’t see the dip in attendance it usually does.
Join Allen White and Jeremy Gant from One Ten Pictures for a FREE On Demand Webinar on Effective Easter Launch Strategies: allinsmallgroups.com
By Allen White
“All In” is a pledge and commitment at Clemson University. The Tigers and the fans are “All In.” Of course, this commitment led to Clemson to become the 2017 National Champions! Go Tigers! Even if you’re not a Clemson fan, you have to admit, that was quite a game.
What does it mean for a church to be All In with small groups? A church being “All In” with small groups doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is in groups or that the church doesn’t offer anything else for connection and discipleship. Being All In speaks more to the church’s focus.
If a church’s focus is connecting people into groups, then the strategy is to recruit group leaders and assign people to groups. If the focus is developing group leaders in the traditional sense, then the strategy is typically training an apprentice and dividing the group into two groups. Both of these methods can get a church part-way in, but not All In.
All In speaks to equipping and empowering every member to lead others. While pastors would love to see all of their people serving, the reality in the church world is that we’ve made leadership, discipleship, and service far too complex. Let’s face it, by the time church members complete their training and fulfill the requirements, they have probably convinced themselves that ministry is beyond them, and they need more training! We don’t have that kind of time. We need leaders now.
Small groups are the number one way of equipping and empowering your people for service. In fact, I would even say while groups are great at connecting, discipling, and caring for people, the primary purpose of groups is leadership development. The more groups you have, the more leaders you develop.
But, how do you do this in a way that’s not watered-down or just plain scary?
By developing an easy-to-use resource, anyone in your church can gather a few friends and do a study together. How about that? I just gave you a strategy to recruit “leaders” and form “groups” without using either one of those words. You don’t need to. It works as long as your people have friends.
Now, please understand, I am a recovering control freak. For years no one led a group unless I recruited and trained them. And, no one joined a group unless I placed them in the group or approved it. It was safe, but we quickly got stuck. I couldn’t recruit enough leaders. Groups weren’t growing. Then, we tried something.
We delivered our pastor’s teaching on a video and made it available to our congregation. Then, we told people if they were willing to get together with their friends, then we would help them. We saw something amazing happen.
First, our pastor was more interested in groups than ever before. He made an investment by creating the video teaching. Now, he wanted to make sure it succeeded. While I had been handpicking leaders for the seven years prior, my pastor made the invitation to this series and we doubled our groups in a day.
Oh, and here’s the second thing — our people were more interested in groups too. If people attend any church, but aren’t connected to each other, the reason they’re there, other than Jesus, is the senior pastor. They connect with the pastors’ teaching and laugh at their jokes. They like their pastors’ style and personality. When pastors offer their people exclusive content for small groups, guess what? You are giving people more of what they already like. It’s an easy sell. When you offer to help them get started, they’re All In.
Honestly, producing curriculum is a lot of work. But, you don’t have to do all of the work.
But, isn’t it expensive? Well, it all depends on how you go about it.
What if my pastor doesn’t have an idea for the next Purpose-Driven Life? You don’t need one. The team at One Ten Pictures already has a curriculum for you. In fact, the study guide, teaching scripts, graphic design, and template are already done. You just need to add your pastor on video at an affordable cost.
If you think this is too good to be true, then join the next webinar with Joseph Myers, author of The Search to Belong and Organic Community and Allen White, author of Exponential Groups as we explain a simple way to create an easy-to-use resource.
What would happen if everyone in your church joined together to grow spiritually and to reach your community this Easter?
