This is Kerrick Thomas here, Executive Pastor at The Journey and co-author of Activate: An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups.

Nelson asked me share today about another one of the questions that people ask regularly when setting up their Small Groups System – the question of whether or not to identify small groups by age, or to ask it differently, should you offer “age-graded” groups?

This is often asked by people who are transitioning from a Sunday School model or another approach that traditionally identified groups by age, and like a lot of questions when it comes to small groups the answer is… it depends.

Here at The Journey, we do identify some groups by age – but not all.

For instance, we have college-aged, recent grads, 20′s, 30′s, over 35 and over 40 groups. But many of our groups are just open, “general” groups for people of all ages.  Our average age is 29, so we’re still pretty young as a church.

My thought would be that the more diverse you are, age-wise, the more you might want to designate the groups.

We’ll also talk with the group leaders about it.  Usually, if the leaders are especially young or are older – you might think about designating by age as well.

I hope that helps!

Blessings…

Kerrick

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