A problem worth praising God for

Somebody came to you with it as a problem. That is usually how this starts. A staff member, or an elder, or a woman in your congregation who has been watching her neighbour’s house fill up on Thursday nights, and the sentence comes out with worry underneath it: there are four of these groups now, and nobody is checking what they teach, and none of them come here.

Before you answer that, stop and do something that will feel out of order.

Praise God first, out loud, in front of the person who is worried

People are believing who did not believe. Groups are starting groups. Whatever else is true, that is the thing your church has been praying for on Wednesday nights for years, and it is happening within walking distance.

If you go straight to the concerns, you will teach the person in front of you that growth is a management problem. They will carry that into every conversation they have about it afterward, and it will curdle. So say the true thing first, and mean it: this is what we asked God for.

praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. — Acts 2:47 (OTB)

Notice who is doing the adding in that sentence. Not the apostles. Not a strategy. The Lord added, and the church praised. Get that order wrong at the start and everything downstream of it goes wrong too.

Then ask the real question, because it is real

Celebration is not the end of the conversation. The worry underneath your elder’s sentence is not stupid, and this class exists because it is not.

Here is the question, stated honestly: how do these disciples stay strong? New believers need worship they did not invent, teaching that goes deeper than what a group can discover alone, and a body wider than eight people in a living room. Your church has all three. It would be strange to pretend otherwise.

And here is the second question, which almost nobody asks out loud: what happens to that zeal when it meets your congregation?

The risk runs in both directions

This is what makes the decision hard, and it is worth naming now so the rest of the class makes sense.

Get it wrong in one direction and you smother them. You fold four young groups into the midweek programme, put their facilitators in a classroom as students, and within a year the obedience question has quietly stopped being asked and the groups have stopped multiplying. Nobody meant to do that. It happened because a young culture met an older one and lost.

Get it wrong in the other direction and you abandon them. You decide the groups are not your business, and people who are eight months old in the faith are left without worship, without anyone older to ask, and without the wider body — and you were standing right there the whole time.

Both of those are failures of care, not just of strategy. The rest of this class is about the narrow road between them: come alongside them, not over them, and get the timing right.

Neither half works without the other. Right posture at the wrong time still breaks something. So does perfect timing delivered from above.