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Cover: Coming Alongside DBS Groups — two people in conversation at first light, on level ground.

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Coming Alongside DBS Groups

Groups are multiplying near your church. The question is not whether to welcome them — it is when, and in what posture.

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Something is happening that you did not start. Discovery groups are meeting in houses near your church, people are believing, and the groups are starting other groups. That is an answer to prayer before it is anything else — and it still leaves you with a decision nobody trained you for. Do you gather them in? Do you leave them alone? This class is about the third answer: come alongside them, without coming over them, and get the timing right.

It is written to church leaders and elders, but chapters 3 and 5 are just as much for the facilitator or coach standing on the other side of that relationship — the posture question has two sides, and both of you have to get it right.

Eight short chapters. Prerequisite: Talking to Your Church Leader.

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Chapters

  1. A problem worth praising God forRapid growth is an answered prayer before it is a question.
  2. What the church is actually forDBS births faith. The church nurtures it. They were never rivals.
  3. Alongside, not overStrengthen, don't smother. Encourage, don't dominate.
  4. They lean toward the light on their ownAttendance is fruit, not door.
  5. What partnership actually looks likeFive things a church can do this month without taking anything over.
  6. The danger of bringing them in too soonComplacency is contagious, and the honest question is about your room.
  7. Let them wake the church upDBS groups don't just reach the lost. They can revive the found.
  8. Timing and posturePartners in one mission — and both halves have to be right.
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Leading this class

For Leaders

Printables

Leader book (PDF)Everything in the workbook, plus facilitator notes, timing, and answers.

How to use them

This class does not work in the abstract

Every chapter asks about specific groups, specific facilitators, specific touchpoints. A room that cannot name a real group or a real person is not ready for this class, and no amount of good discussion will change that.

Find that out in session one rather than session five. If nobody can name anybody, the honest move is to stop and go find out who is meeting nearby — that is a better use of the term than eight sessions of hypotheticals.

Do not let them hurry past the celebration

Chapter 1 asks a room of church leaders to praise God for something they did not start and do not control. Most rooms give that about ninety seconds and move to strategy.

That hurry is the instinct the chapter is correcting. Slow it down deliberately, say your own praise sentence first, and get one from every person out loud. A room that has not genuinely rejoiced will spend the next seven chapters managing a problem instead of coming alongside a work of God.

Watch which way the tools get turned

Three chapters hand the room an instrument, and each one can be turned the wrong way round.

Chapter 2’s list of what a congregation offers is a description of your church — not a rubric for scoring the groups. Chapter 3’s touchpoint audit collapses if every line comes back “alongside”; the way to reopen it is to ask what an over would even look like on one of these items, and whatever they describe is the standard they have been grading against. And chapter 4’s practices are usually well-meant and often decades old, so expect defensiveness and treat it as information rather than resistance.

Two related traps. False modesty in chapter 2: a pastor who cannot name anything his congregation has to give will keep giving nothing, and these disciples need some of it. And, everywhere in the class, softening the manner while leaving the structure alone — a friendly tone on top of a reporting line is still a reporting line.

Chapter 6 is the one that can do damage

The danger of bringing them in too soon is the most easily misquoted chapter in the class. Repeated at second hand without its second half, it is what leaves a family believing there are two grades of member here.

Three things hold it in place. Work out how you say the culture-not-people distinction before anybody asks you for it: improvised under pressure it lands as exclusion, and you do not get that back. Keep it as a decision about pace that you hold, never a doctrine a group is taught. And make sure it has an exit — a group protected indefinitely has quietly become a second congregation, and chapter 7 is the exit, not an optional extra.

One thing, done, with a name and a date

Chapter 5 offers five ways to partner and the room will want all five. Ask for one, carried through — five committed to on a whiteboard is the very outcome the chapter was written to head off.

The same discipline closes the class. Chapter 8 collects the names and dates written in chapters 5, 6 and 7 — re-read them before that session or you waste the close. Watch for final answers pitched at churches in general rather than at this one — that version is comfortable to give and changes nothing on Monday. Nobody leaves without a name and a date.

Using the two books

The workbook is the participant’s: short lead-in, the questions, the space to write. Print it front-and-back for a binder.

The leader book is this one plus the whole teaching and the facilitator layer — per-chapter timing, what to prepare, and what to watch for. Keep it open in front of you during the session. It carries answers and notes that are not in the participant book, so hand out the workbook, never this.

This class

8 chapters

Groups are multiplying near your church. The question is not whether to welcome them — it is when, and in what posture.

Time needed

Per session
25 to 35 minutes per chapter
In total
Eight sessions, or four evenings of two

Before you lead

Arrive with three things settled about your own congregation, because each is asked of you before you may ask it of anyone: your praise sentence for what God is doing in these groups, one honest item from the touchpoint audit that you would rather not mark, and the name of one facilitator near you along with one thing you have noticed about their work. A leader who improvises these in front of a room teaches the opposite of the chapter.

What to bring

  • A printed workbook for every participant
  • The names of the real groups and real facilitators near your church