The theme of this year’s Leadership Retreat was All In.  I challenged leaders to go “all in” with discipleship.  Check out this video to learn more about a major NCC small group initiative for 2011.

Part of my job as Small Group Catalyst at National Community Church is to convince people of things.  I try to convince group leaders to raise up new leaders.  I try to convince new attendees to try out groups.  But I’m not a salesman, at least not in the traditional sense of the word which conjures up images of a guy in a bad polyester jacket trying to sell you an overpriced, under-maintained 1997 Dodge Caravan.

What’s the difference between a leader and a salesman?

A salesman tries to convince you of the value of what he’s promoting.  A leader believes personally in the value what he’s promoting and wants to help you understand its value too.

I don’t just ask others to lead small groups; I lead them myself.  I don’t just ask others to reach out to people they don’t know; I meet new people.  I don’t just ask others to commit to raising up new leaders; I commit to raising up new leaders.  I model the behavior I want to see repeated.

I believe in the value of the actions that I’m trying to convince others to take.  I believe they are good things, necessary things, and I’m inviting others to join me.

What is your ultimate concern? What sits on the throne of your life?  What rules you?

Is it your work?  Your spouse?  Your children?  Maybe it’s the pursuit of success, money, or a love of sports.  Perhaps the most important thing to you is to be needed by others.

The problem is that none of those things will ultimately satisfy.

Convergence, a new video-based small group curriculum featuring discussions between best-selling author Donald Miller and other Christian thinkers, addresses just these sorts of profound yet incredibly practical questions.

As part of a blog tour for this series, I’ve been asked to review an episode entitled, “Frustration and False Gods,” featuring Dr. Tremper Longman, professor of Biblical studies, and Dr. Dan Allender, professor of counseling.  In the video, Miller and Drs. Tremper and Longman examine the book of Ecclesiastes and ask us to consider just what are those things we center our lives around.

The Good:

• There’s a theological depth and weight to their conversation that I think is too often missing from books and studies.  It may be a bit heady for some folks, but I love it.
• The videos are short enough to actually leave time for conversation, but they still pack in an incredible insight and thought provoking questions.
• They’ve got free discussion guides to go along with the videos.  Who doesn’t love free?
• Price: the videos are cheap.  It’s only $3.99 per download or $14.99 per 3-4 video DVD.

The Bad:

• Some people prefer the conversational format to a talking head, but I think it left the videos fairly unstructured.  I think some folks might get a bit lost if they’re totally unfamiliar with the topic.
• The delivery was somewhat dry and could have been more engaging.

All in all, I enjoyed the video.  I think it will really make members think and spark great discussion.  I’d recommend this study for groups whose members are eager to learn or need to be pushed, stretched, and challenged.  The more engaged your group members, the more likely I would be to recommend it.  I suggest that you as the leader take a look at one or two of these videos and if your group is at the right place to benefit from them.

If you’re interested in checking out one of the videos, you can download them at the Convergence Store.  The first 25 people who use the promo code “Johnston” will get their first episode free.

I’d encourage you to visit Dr. Bill Donahue’s blog on Friday when he’ll be reviewing another episode, “Personal Growth: Learning to meet the demands of life.”  Dr. Donahue is an author, speaker, and consultant who formerly worked with small groups at Willow Creek.  He’s full of wisdom on leadership and group life.

Other Reviews from the Convergence Blog Tour

Frustration and False Gods Trailer

FTC Disclosure: I was given a free copy of Frustration and False Gods in order to do this review/blog tour.

Dave Auda is the Pastor of Developers at Mosaic Church in Los Angeles, CA.

This is straight out of our small group leader training bootcamp.

I’ve been a part of this community of faith for 33 years.  Basically, I  grew up in this community.  Mosaic is a place that God did amazing healing and restoration through group life and provided an amazing opportunity for me to turn that blessing around and become a blessing to other people.

I’m going to be talking dominantly about group life and evangelism and how to ignite an apostolic ethos in our community and even among the seekers that are coming.

For the last couple of days of the conference I’ve been talking and texting with a new believer friend of mine who has come from a difficult background.  Even as I get to hang out here with some amazing brothers and sisters, Art asked me to tell you that he is praying for you.

At Mosaic, small groups exist to live out the great commandment and carry out the great commission. As we live out the great commandment in community and carry out the great commission in community, we actually create communities of transformed lives. That’s how you are currently believers in and followers of Jesus Christ because people did this. And now you have the privilege of doing the same for others.

That’s the role of each of us as individual followers of life and in the context of our small groups, ministry teams, and the Church universal.

One of the things I want to push and lean against is this creeping either/or ministry philosophy: Either we are going to focus on living out the great commandment or we’re going to take on the more militant side of seeking and saving the lost.  I don’t know why that dichotomy is there, that we need to either live out the great commandment or be all about carrying out the great commission, because really the great commission is all about leading people to knowing who Jesus is and then teaching them everything he commanded them.  That sounds pretty holistic to me.  Living out the great commandment, loving God with everything and loving neighbor as self is pretty holistic as well.  I don’t know how we can make this either/or distinction.

I think our individual lives, small groups, ministry teams, faith communities have to be a both/and paradigm, not an either/or paradigm.  If we settle for either/or, we settle for so much less than Jesus calls us to.

Luke 9 – Did you know that Jesus’ primary ministry strategy was being a small group leader?  He was a speaker, etc., but the dominant amount of his time & energy was spent investing into a small group.

Jesus sends out the 12 in Luke 9.  They come back with this amazing report.  Then he chooses 72 and sends them on ahead to the towns and villages ahead of him.  And they do the same thing as the 12, they come back with this amazing report.  At the end of Jesus’ ministry on the mount of Ascension, Jesus is speaking to over 500 disciples and makes the great commission statement and then leaves.

We kinda understand the model of how Jesus pulled together the 12, but how from chapter 9 to chapter 10 did he develop 72 others.  I’d propose that at least in part, maybe in large part, the 72 were based on the obedience of the 12.  And where did the 500 come from?  I’d say at least in part because of the 72 obeying him in radical ways.

That’s the story of the Church.  Jesus empowered his disciples in the context of community to transform the world.  That’s what we’re a part of.  It’s a both/and, evangelism and discipleship.  They’re one and the same.  We’re called to make disciples.

So how do we do that?

We have this 20:20 vision that Paul talks about in Acts 20:20.  He never backs off from teaching the Gospel publicly or privately.  Jesus talks about creating the Church to be a growing community.  Acts 2:42-47 describes the believers as amazed and growing in favor with all the people and that God was adding to their number daily those who were being saved.  They were carrying out the great commission and living out the great commandment in their lives.

Jesus gathers together communities of believers to serve one another and reach other people.  It’s pretty straightforward.

God empowers those communities through the presence of the Holy Spirit

How many people in this room have been following Jesus for one year or less?  How may people would you say are in your life who aren’t following Jesus? Both Answers: 50%

How many people in this room have been following Jesus for 20 years or more?  For those of us who aren’t in full-time ministry or the super-volunteer, any of you willing to answer that same question? Answer: They’re not in my inner circle any more.  I have to purposefully find them.

I’m not trying to leverage a point here.  I’m definitely not trying to humiliate anyone.  I’m just trying to illustrate that living out the great commandment and carrying out the great commission, we default to an either/or lifestyle just because of the way life works, even though in our head we still believe in both, but when we look at our lives and relationships, it doesn’t really reflect that.  After about 1.5-2 years of following Jesus, you’ve eradicated intimate relationships in your life of people who don’t know Jesus, unless they’re related to you.  And have we even cut them out?  They’re part of our family, but we don’t want to feel awkward.  It’s just the way that it happens.

I’m not going to spend the rest of our workshop talking about a developmental model.  Most of our churches are good at this.  We know how to grow in Christ-likeness.  I want us to go back to this problem here.

In order for us to be a radical community of faith, it’s a both/and philosophy, and those of us who have been Christians for a long time have to change something in a radical way.

We’re going to focus on this second part because that’s what we need to change.  It’s not more important, but it’s where we need to grow.

Oikos – house or household – Your sphere of influence consisting of friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors. Defined relationships in your life that have reciprocity.  Friends choose to be friends with each other.  Family is the sovereignty of God.  If you have issues with them, take it up with God.  Co-workers and neighbors.

I grew up without a father, and the men my mother had around tended to abuse me until I got to an age where I could put a stop to it.  God has placed you strategically and gifted you specifically, even if you come from a messed up relational reality. The body of Christ becomes an amazing family and healing community that people need so desperately.

Who is in your oikos that doesn’t know Jesus.  Figure out who that is and share that list with one or two followers of Christ who are close friends of yours and ask those people to pray with you that God would give you specific ways to influence them.  And you know what will happen when you share your list?  Your friend will probably come up with a list of their own.

Xenos – Stranger, foreigner, or alien – So what responsibilities do we have to them?  This is your expanding sphere of influence created through unplanned encounters and personal initiative with strangers.

We’re among strangers all the time.  How do we become salt and light to them?  How do we even recognize those people?

I was a UPS driver for 19 years. Every day I would park in an alley and had to unload the truck in an alley every day. There was a guy named Ron who worked at a gas station near there. He would come talk at me every day as I loaded up the hand truck. One day he hands me a white envelope and says, "I hope you can come." It was a beautiful wedding invitation. I didn’t even know the guy was dating anyone. He asked me if I could come. I told him I’d check my schedule. He asked me every day for three weeks. It turns out I have a leadership development training I have to teach that day and can’t make it. I look at him to say I can’t make it, but the words, "Of course I’ll be there" come out. I wanted to pull them back. He didn’t say another word, he almost danced back to the gas station. On the day of the wedding I realized I didn’t buy a wedding gift, so I grab my video camera and everything and figure I’ll video the beginning of the ceremony. I get there and ask the coordinator which side is for the groom. The bride’s side fills up. No one is on the groom’s side. I’m planning to leave right after the wedding, but he asks me if I’m coming to the reception. Of course, the words come out, "Of course I’ll come." At the reception, he thanks his best friend for coming. It was me. I felt like a germ on a flea on a tick on a… All of these people looked at me. Afterwards he came up to me and thanked me. He said that he sent over 100 invitations to my family and co-workers, and you were the only one who showed up. You have no idea how important you could be in somebody’s life. Shame on me. You have no idea who God has divinely appointed you to touch.

Unplanned encounters, strategic intersections is how you develop your oikos and xenos.

Leadership Lesson #49: Starting small groups is easy.  Making disciples is hard.

You want small groups?  Those are easy.  I can get you small groups.  Three steps:

1. Find an extrovert.
2. Give them curriculum.
3. Tell them to invite their friends.

Okay, so I’ve oversimplified that, and no, I don’t think extroverts are necessarily better leaders.  But you get my point.  It’s easy enough to get a few people in a circle and have a conversation.  It’s hard to move from talking in a circle to relationships where lives are really changed.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve got this figured out.  You’ll notice I didn’t title this post, “Three Keys to Discipleship.”  I don’t have all of the answers.  I know it takes time.  It takes dedication.  It takes hard work.  You have to be teachable.  You have to be willing to expose your faults.

You can’t do disciple-making justice in a soundbite.  I could write a twenty page post on the subject, and others far more knowledgeable than I have written many books.  Sufficed to say, don’t assume just because you have small groups that everyone in those groups is being discipled.

As many of you know, until recently I was on Team D (the discipleship team) at National Community Church. For several years we’ve had a system of small groups coaches in place to help guide our small group leaders.

We’ve gotten much, much bigger as a church since we implemented that coaching system, and our small groups strategy has changed radically. Heather Zempel, our Discipleship Pastor, decided that it was time to rethink how we do small group coaching, so she commenced “Operation KABOOM!” In other words, we’re blowing up the old coaching model and building a new one from the ground up.

I’m excited to be able to be a part of strategizing our new coaching system. We had our first big team meeting tonight, and it was very insightful to hear from some different folks on coaching/mentoring/leading from a number of different approaches, from the military to sports coaches to parenting, just to name a few. We also looked at some biblical examples of discipleship.

My plan is to discuss some of the topics we covered here in the coming days.

Breakout D

Description: Leading leaders can become a lonely calling, but can it be less lonely when pursued within a synergetic team? Discover the Mosaic strategy of coaching and caring for small group leaders through the use of MPAC teams.

Speaker’s Bio: Dave Auda is a Pastor of Developers at Mosaic in Los Angeles, C.A. He has served in this dynamic community of faith, love, and hope for over 30 years. Dave has helped pioneer and champion Small Group communities since 1977. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California Baptist University, and a Master of Theological Studies from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. He is husband to Tamra, and father to four daughters, Sarah, Ruthi, Rebekah, and Deborah. His superhero identity at Mosaic is “Adrenalin”. His ministry and life motto is “Excel still more!”

Notes:

Two of five core values at Mosaic: 1) Mission is why the Church exists. Love is the context for all mission.

Jesus accomplished a lot of things in his earthly ministry.

• Miraculous healing
• Raised the dead
• Fed the 5,000
• Obeyed the Father
• Taught/led a team
• Lived a life that we’re supposed to model
• Cast out demons

There are a lot of things that we can’t emulate instantly, but Luke 19:10 encapsulates why Jesus came, to seek and save the lost. That was Jesus’ primary objective, and as he was working toward this, he obtained a lot of collateral blessing.

Living out the the Great Commandment and carrying out the Great Commission. That’s why we have small groups. That’s what we get a chance to be: life savers. It’s exciting to sit at Starbucks and hear stories of transformed lives.

Today I want to talk a little bit about how we at Mosaic care for and mobilize our small group leaders.

We discovered that the Leader Standing Alone model didn’t work. I was having too many conversations with good people who wanted to step down, to quit, to be let go. There wasn’t commonality among the people who were saying this. It wasn’t just one type of person/leader.

Leaders had different skills, and instead of trying to train an individual in multiple things, which they may not be good at, why don’t we just team together multiple people.

God reveals Himself as a team, different roles, aspects, same God. Different approaches, same mission.

Two people can accomplish more than twice as much as one. A person standing alone can be attacked and be defeated, but two standing back to back can be attacked an conquered. Three are even better because a triple braided cord is not easily broken.

This is just a model. It is not normative.

There are things that core team coaching can accomplish that are superior to other models.

It minimizes burnout of coaches and small group leaders. You’re not calling the coach to draw from a well that they don’t have, and it doesn’t require small group leaders to be coached by someone with whom they don’t connect. It minimizes blind spots.

It maximizes spiritual gifts and strengths. As proverbs says, two is better than one and three is even better than two.

It expands the coaching capacity of each of the individual coaches. In some models an isolated coach is expected to cast vision and mission to anywhere from 8-15 leaders. In some contexts the numbers even go higher. At Mosaic, we have a coaching team that oversees 25-35 small group leaders.

It’s a whole lot more fun to serve others with others than to serve others alone.

There are also some downsides to this model.

Like any type of relationship/bonding thing you do, there is a honeymoon period after a coaching core team comes together, but then they hit a reality wall. All of the sudden there is conflict on the team. They work together well on their best moments, but their best moments aren’t 24×7. You have to help them work through these things. At the other end of it you end up with a team of people that grow to depend on one another (interdependency, not codependency).

The styles of leadership are not evenly dispersed among the Body of Christ. You don’t have an equal number of each leadership style within the community. Generally speaking, you’ll have about 50% of your leaders who are pastors, about 40% who are assimilators, and maybe 10% who are catalysts. A disclaimer in regards to catalysts: they don’t usually play well with others. They’re your mavericks. They’re self-motivated, self-driven, self-correcting and don’t have a lot of time to deal with people who aren’t. They are going to be actively doing leading catalyzing, changing things. Generally speaking, church leadership structures are not friendly, warm environments for catalytic leaders. Look in places that you wouldn’t think to look for catalytic leaders. They might be leading your pre-school ministry, but probably not. You want to look for leaders in other environments outside of church. You want to look for marginalized, focused people who are trying to do something. You want to look for zealots. They may not be doing something actually significant, but they believe they are. That’s why they’re doing it.

These core teams are used in all ministries, not just small groups.

Coaches meet with each other every other month, and with their small group leaders on the off months.

People rarely fit cleanly into one of the three categories, but there’s bleed over. Sometimes you find the most catalytic person you can and help them develop their catalytic side.

Core team doesn’t only get involved when there’s a problem. They’re also in a supportive role.

The small group leaders are trained through involvement in groups, developmental mentoring within small groups. The supplemental level is that we provided a 101 class every other month.

Some of our groups are open-ended and continue to exist. Some are semester groups. Most are open, but some are closed (such as recovery groups).

We don’t force coaching on anyone, but people want it.

What are Mosaic’s qualifications for small group leaders? Before we jsut launched 200 groups, I could answer this very well. At Mosaic we have our volunteer staff process. Most congregations have a membership process. Everyone who comes to Mosaic is a member. We’re here to love you, care for you, serve you, teach you, etc. Once you’re in, if you want to move into the inner core, you come on volunteer staff. They apply to that process. It’s a rather rigorous process, but at the end of being commississioned, you have the keys of the kingdom. You can be connected to any area of ministry at which you can be connected. If you have not done that, there are still many areas of ministry that you can be connected, you just can’t take an oversight position over people. What about small group leaders that aren’t on volunteer staff. Basically, everyone can lead a small group based on relational influence. You can have as many groups/clubs as you want based on how many people you can get to show up. It’s a fairly low bar of training but a high bar of relational influence. The only groups that we would post on our website or have on our kiosk at the small groups ministry table are groups that are led by people on volunteer staff.

What kind of a process of training or experience do you walk your core team members through? I wish I could tell you that I have a 300 page highly structured manual.

Our coaches may or may not lead small groups.

The system is organic. It’s like a marriage. The division of roles and responsibilities isn’t set in stone.