Adam Bishop (Small Groups Pastor at The Journey) here again.  I shared yesterday that the key to identifying and involving enough small group leaders at your church is to make that process a priority for each of your current group leaders.

The only way to get your group leaders to actively pray for new leaders, see potential leaders as Jesus sees them and ask them to lead is through… you guessed it – TRAINING.

The training of your group leaders can be broken down into three categories:

1. ONCE-A-SEMESTER SMALL GROUP LEADERS TRAINING - This training needs to take place two weeks prior to the start of each semester.  At The Journey, we have ours on a Sunday afternoon for three hours.  So if you have a spring, summer, and fall semester you will have three trainings a year.

Begin with the end goal in mind – clearly communicate to your group leaders at the training that identifying, asking, and producing new group leaders from their group is one of the goals of leading a group.

Celebrate and reward group leaders who have modeled this well.  At our last training, I gave away three gift cards for a day at the spa to the three group leaders who had produced the most new group leaders. Remember, what gets rewarded gets repeated.

2. WEEKLY TRAINING - Utilize a weekly email to your group leaders to reinforce the importance of identifying and asking new people to lead.

Around four to six weeks into the semester, ask your current group leaders to respond with the names of current group members who could potentially lead next semester.

3. MONTHLY TEAM LEADER TRAINING – I do not meet with all of our group leaders on a monthly basis, but I do meet with our Team Leaders.

Our team leaders are high capacity volunteers who provide care, communication, and coaching to the leaders of the five small groups on their team.  The number of team leaders you have will grow as your number of groups grows.

I lead a one hour a month meeting with our Team Leaders on Monday nights.  Regardless of the agenda at these meetings, I always make a point to focus on identifying and asking new people to lead in some form.

They in turn continue to communicate the importance of this to the group leaders on their team.  All of this serves to raise the value of finding new leaders in our small groups system.

Don’t miss tomorrow’s post where I’ll share the most important element in finding enough group leaders…

P.S. The new Small Groups Pastor Tele-Coaching Network that Kerrick Thomas and I are leading is beginning in less than a month and we still have a few more spots available.  For more information and to download an application, CLICK HERE