The line below was thrown out in a meeting that had very little to do with community outreach, but it was so sticky that I have incorporated it into every part of our community outreach strategy.

“At Elevation Church, when it comes to community outreach, we want to partner with mission not create it!� - Pastor Steven Furtick

           Why is this line so significant?

It is significant because it captures the very essence of Elevation Church’s community outreach strategy. A lot of churches have people who are passionate about feeding the hungry in their city and they feel the need to start a food pantry – so they do. At the same time there is a guy who wants to serve the homeless, so he goes off with the church’s blessing and starts a homeless ministry. The youth group adopts a neighborhood, the seniors read to the kids at the school, the women’s ministry serves food at thanksgiving, and the men start a remodeling ministry and on and on it goes. All of these things are wonderful but here is the problem: spreading out the leaders, resources and man power will exert maximum effort while achieving minimal impact.
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At Elevation we have decided to flip this on its head. Rather than spread everything out, we’re focusing! We are concentrating all our efforts on four strategic community outreach partners that are already knocking it out of the park in our city:
1)     Communities in Schools – Safe Journey
2)Â Â Â Â Â Crisis Assistance Ministries
3)Â Â Â Â Â Friendship Trays
4)Â Â Â Â Â Charlotte Reads

By partnering with these ministries we are able to piggy-back on the organizational infrastructure that they already have in place. We benefit from their partnerships in the city. Most importantly, we are able to rapidly identify the people, and communities in our city that have the greatest need. We have partnered with the mission of these organizations and joined in where they are already making an impact and by doing so we have accelerated what we have been able to accomplish in our city.  Â

John Bishop, Community Groups Pastor

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When I became a Small Groups Pastor I naturally had a lot of questions. I didn’t know anything about building, leading or maintaining a Small Groups ministry. Everything that came up was new and therefore felt like an irresolvable problem.

After a few short months as a Small Groups Pastor I found myself attending a conference at a great church not too far from us. One of the most profound results of that conference for me was the business card that I brought away from it…Â

I got to speak with the Small Groups Pastor of that great church after a breakout. When he heard what God was doing at Elevation he handed me his card and invited me to contact him at any time. I was a little nervous to take him up on his invitation, however, because I thought, “I’m probably only going to get one chance to speak with this guy so which question should I ask?� I knew he was busy and I wanted to respect his time but I had a lot of questions. Besides, everything is so interconnected if he were to tell me how to identify leaders I would wonder how he tracked them. If he were to tell me how build a great GroupLink I would wonder how to get people there etc…

So here’s my advice. When contacting someone with questions…Â

1)Â Â Â Â Â Ask one good question.
2)Â Â Â Â Â Expect to get one or two nuggets at best.
3)     Stick to the practical issues that you’ll be dealing with after you hang up.
4)Â Â Â Â Â Set a time limit (15-30 minutes) and stick to it.
5)Â Â Â Â Â Ask if you can call the person again sometime.
6)Â Â Â Â Â Send an email to thank the person afterwards.

When I contacted the Small Groups guy above I did it right, but only because Pastor Furtick gave me the advice that I just gave you. By the time I actually unpacked in his little nugget six months had passed. In fact, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to apply his response in my context…

My question: “What is your first step in the leader selection process?â€?Â
His answer: “Generate Leads!�

John Bishop, Small Groups Pastor

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During the first ten months of my career as a Small Groups guy, I made a mistake. I know now that my choice was leading the Small Groups ministry straight down the path to spiritual bankruptcy but I didn’t think about it at the time. I was an amateur trying to harness some phenomenal growth and momentum and I made a game-time decision that almost cost us BIG.

While the people were becoming more and more interested in groups and the number of people being commissioned into leadership was on the rise…while the administrative systems we had created were beginning to pump out numbers and stories of life change were beginning to roll in…while all of this was going on, I was ignoring the development needs of my current group leaders. They had committed themselves to a vision I had cast and were working hard to minister to the people in their groups, but each and every day that I didn’t reinforce the vision and provide them with needed resources and counsel they were quietly growing tired

Thankfully, we are only 18 months old and I have had some great people helping me along the way who were able to look me in the eyes and say, “we should really spend a lot more time developing our current Small Group leaders.� Of course, as soon as they said it I knew they were right, but some times it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. Basically, I had gotten into the habit of thinking that we only had a handful of groups and that if the leaders needed anything they would call. The problem was the “handful� quickly went from 16 to 25 to 50 while my systems continued along unchanged.

As a result of this new discovery I have made four Leader Development events a standard part of our yearly calendar. I suspect that some of these events will be celebratory and I will focus on encouraging the leaders. Others will be very vision focused and I’ll spend most of the time driving home strategies. But these things really don’t matter! What does matter is this: Leader Development can’t ever fall off my radar again.

John Bishop, Small Groups Pastor

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A follow-up to my previous entry…
Ever since I posted the entry about GroupLink in May people have been contacting me wanting to know all about GroupLink. The first thing I do is send them to the professionals for better advice (North Point Community Church), but when I they persist it seems like they’re all asking the same question “is it worth it�?
We don’t ever do anything just for the sake of doing it, and GroupLink certainly takes a lot of time so if it isn’t worth it, then we should eliminate it immediately and save ourselves a lot of hastle.Â
Well – as you would expect – I am fully convinced that it is worth it!
Three reasons we spend time and money on GroupLink are:
1)     It creates momentum…
2)     It is an effective way to get people connected…
3)     It provides opportunities for relationships…
Momentum…
           GroupLink creates a needed pivot point in the Small Groups ministry. If all that ever happened in the Small Groups ministry was behind the scenes then there would never be a rallying point for Leader Recruitment or motivation for our groups to multiply. In January, we saw twice as much interest in small groups as we had anticipated. This surge of momentum gave us a lot of fuel to recruit leaders. Right before GroupLink in January I had exhausted every last contact and looked under every rock, but within a week of the event I had a whole crop of new leaders emerge. They saw the need and responded!
Effective…
The reason we do GroupLink is that it provides an environment in which people can meet their future group. I have a beautiful process set up to handle small group inquirers in non-GroupLink seasons, but I have found that no matter how hard we try to get people plugged into groups they are less likely to drive across town without that personal contact.
Relationships…
GroupLink stands alone as a great opportunity for people to meet each other. After every group had been filled, and all the decorations had been tossed there were still crowds of people standing around. I believe, as I’m sure you do too, that people are craving relationships. The beauty of GroupLink is that people stumble into relationships where they weren’t expecting them; they cross that awkward barrier by simply coming to an event.
John Bishop, Small Groups Pastor
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