The key to having a large, vibrant, missional church is to have a lot of small, vibrant, missional churches. The Ginghamsburg model relies on a simple organizational technique familiar to many congregations for their missional success: small group ministry.
I sat in on a workshop with Ginghamsburg’s Small Group Ministry Coordinator Kevin Applegate and picked up a lot of insights into not only successful small group work, but successful community and mission oriented church.
In order to understand the small groups at Ginghamsburg, it’s necessary to understand membership in the church. Ginghamsburg has a main campus sanctuary that seats 900 and averages an attendance of 5,000 at its variety of weekend worship services. The church only has 1,200 official members, however, and the heart of the church is the small groups which meet every week.
There are four requirements for membership at Ginghamsburg:
1. Attendance at worship
2. Participation in Small Group
3. Tithe 10% to the church
4. Serve the Community out of your strengths
Ginghamsburg presents this as three C’s:
Celebration – bring
Cell- grow
Call – serve
Ginghamsburg requires a 12 week membership class, 4 weeks of which is the Strengthfinders program and Ministering out of Your Strengths. All members must meet with the ministry staff and talk about how they will serve out of their strengths.
Service is, as Applegate said, “ingrained in the Ginghamsburg DNA. If you don’t want to serve, you won’t last long at this church. You can’t get there saying it or talking about it. It (service needs to be in everything you do)." Service is in everything at Ginghamsburg. It is even in the terminology. There are no volunteers at Ginghamsburg. Volunteers are called Servants. If you are helping out with an event (such as the folks driving vans or making coffee or helping us find rooms at this conference) you are serving.
Ginghamsburg encourages small groups to serve as groups. People are more likely to serve with each other and when they do things together. Serving in this way, helps people in their goal, which is finding their purpose and call and finding it in the group is part of the purpose of being in a group.
Ginghamsburg currently has 2600 people in 250 groups. The continuously offer a Self start 4 week class for starting up new small groups.
Applegate spent the bulk of the workshop explaining Ginghamsburg’s Four goals of small groups:
1 Create authentic community
Work through relationship issues and flaws
2. Life transforming Bible study. Where truth meets life. (In a liberal church setting, this can be either a liberal approach to scripture study, world scripture study, or other spiritual or study curricula. The important thing is that there is a spiritual and not just a social focus of the groups. more on this below.)
3. Serving together as a group.
4. Connecting to god as a group – prayer practice as a group. (In a liberal church setting – and really Ginghamsburg is not a fundamentalist bible church, but a rather mainline Methodist community – this could be a circle of trust journey sharing group a la Parker Palmer or other type of meeting where people’s religious journeys meet real life).
Applegate stressed that action is the key to the structure. Small group ministry is active and there must be accountability (everyone has refrigerator privileges in each other’s homes was one phrase used over and over again).
Service and study keeps groups from becoming stagnant or becoming social groups or dinner groups. It can be easy for small group ministry groups to turn inward, but keeping an outward focus prevents that. Outward focussed service doesn’t prevent building community, but along with study, it is one way to develop community. Always keep an open chair or empty chair at group meetings. It is not to represent Jesus or Elijah, but to represent those in the world we serve, to remind us that we have a mission beyond ourselves!
Group size: 8-10 people is max for a small group. Groups at Ginghamsburg remain constant, some have been together for decades. They develop deep and lasting community. People are encouraged to start of join a group as soon as they come to the church and do not need to be members to be in a group.
Serving strategies and goals for small groups:
1. Serve each other. Many people have not done any service or have done any in a long time. Serving each other in a small group setting is both a community builder and the first way to practice serving the world and making it a better place all at the same time. The group also becomes the primary place of pastoral care. When person goes into hospital, the call goes to the small group, not the pastor’s office. The reason? It’s a huge church. Do you want a pastor who may not have even met you coming to the hospital or do you want a couple of people who meet with you and pray with you and serve with you all the time coming to visit you and support you and pray with you when you are in a time of crisis?
2. Serving together in mission at least once a quarter. Serving together binds groups together and reinforces individual and group as well as congregational mission.
3. Offer abundant and promising opportunities to serve. There are no volunteers at Ginghamsburg Church. Everyone and anyone helping out with anything at the church is called a servant because they are serving the mission of the church "Changing the World, One Person at a Time” whenever they help out.
4. Lead by Example. Provide inspiration and promote service and mission by giving your personal testimony. Pledge and fulfill resource promises (be a good financial steward and make good on your pledge to the church). Encourage group-inspired and God-inspired projects – seek to see the spirit moving in others and support it. Be active in serving.
Ginghamsburg gives people a lot of freedom to do ministry and serve. It is a permission giving church. There are no committees, only a governing board of twelve. A staff of 24 and service from the small groups get everything done. If the staff seems large, think of this: A small mainline congregation with 100 members and 1 minister, a part-time administrator and a part-time DRE has a member to staff ratio of 50:1 (1 full time staff, 2 part time staff = 2 full time staf / 100 members) while Ginghamsburg with 1200 members and 24 staff also has a member to staff ratio of 50:1, but figure in that Ginghamsburg has an ATTENDANCE of 5000, the attendance to staff ratio is 208:1 while our mainline church usually has less people in attendance than it has members so lets say our attendance is 75 on Sunday and our attendance to staff ratio is 38:1.
In the bulletin and newsletter there is always a place for the small group to serve, but it needs to be doable stuff. So what can people do to serve? Ginghamsburg offers these suggestions (among others) to its small groups:
Food pantry pick up and distribution
Have a Yard Sale and donate proceeds to mission (not the church!) Ginghamsburg has donated over $5 million to Darfur relief.
Clothing Store pick up, sort, organize and distribution
Nursing home visitation
Block parties for children
School Aides and tutoring, classroom help
Christmas gifts drives
Homeless shelter food preparation or serving
Thanksgiving food preparation or serving
Church site needs: mowing, space design, parking lot, repairs
Church ministry needs: bulletin stuffing, greeters, office administration help
Elderly home needs: repairs, furniture repair, support, visits
Community Park Activities
Gateway Cafe Cooks
Short term mission trips: overnights, overseas
Ginghamsburg currently has 2600 people in 250 small groups. The church continuously offers a Self start 4 week class for people who want to start a new small group. The class is four 60-minute sessions. The sessions are 30 minutes of teaching and 30 minutes of doing or practicing what being in a small group is like. Applegate said “We tell them what a small group is and then we do it so they experience the power of it.”
Ginghamsburg also uses periodic campaigns where they offer an open signup for six weeks and hope at end of six weeks the groups they put together then stay together for the long haul.
Red Pill Brethren 