Ecclesiology 10 - A New Church - part 8: The Small Group as Basic Structure

    For these final installments of The Problem of Wineskins, we change our tone dramatically.  To this point, we've been looking at church ecclesiology and its meaning to the 21st-century Western church almost exclusively as a theory.  We now turn our attention to practical application of that theory.  We begin our application with illumination of the subject of small groups as basic church structure.

    A small group of eight to twelve people meeting together informally in homes is the most effective structure for the communication of the gospel in modern seculurban society.  This is one of the principle conclusions suggested by the analysis in the previous chapters.  The small group was the basic unit of the church's life during its first two centuries.  In fact, the use of small groups of one kind or another seems to be a common element in all significant movements of the Holy Spirit throughout church history.  Today the church needs to rediscover what the early Christians found: that small group meetings are something essential to Christian experience and growth.

    The small group offers a number of advantages over other forms of the church in an urban world:

(1) It is flexible.  Because of its informality it has little need for rigid patterns of operation.

(2) It is mobile.  It is not bound to that building on the corner of First and Elm and does not have to rely on persuading strangers to enter a foreign environment.

(3) It is inclusive.  In The Incendiary Fellowship (NY: Harper & Row, 1967, 70) Elton Trueblood says "When a person is drawn into a circle, devoted to prayer and to deep sharing of spiritual resources, he is well aware that he is welcomed for his own sake, since the small group has no budget, no officers concerned with the success of their administration, and nothing to promote."

 (4) It is personal.  Christian communication suffers from impersonality.  Often it is too slick, too professional, and, therefore, too impersonal.  But in a small group person meets person; communication takes place at the personal level.

(5) It can grow by division.  A small group is effective only while small, but it can reproduce itself.  There are endless possibilities for numerical growth through division without correspondingly large financial outlays or spiritual impact dilution.

(6) It can be an effective means of evangelism.  Robert Raines testified in New Life in the Church (NY: Harper & Row, 1961, 70) "I have watched proportionately more lives genuinely converted in and through small group meetings for prayer, Bible study, and the sharing of life than in the usual organizations and activities of the institutional church."

(7) It requires a minimum of professional leadership.  Competent leadership is needed in such groups, but experience has shown that a staff of trained, degreed professionals is not required.

(8) It is adaptable to the institutional church.  Small groups can be introduced without bypassing or undercutting the church.  The small group is best seen as an essential component of the church's structure and ministry, not as a replacement for the church.

(9) It quells animosity.  The church is ordained primarily as a means of representing God's unconditional love on earth.  It is vulgarly easy for a large group of Us, Christian or otherwise, to develop ill-will toward a vague collective Them, but it is virtually impossible for Me, having shared fellowship in a small group, to hate You despite any differences in opinion, race, class or other disparity.

    In A Drink at Joe's Place (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1967, 24), Jess Moody says "We will win the world when we realize that fellowship, not evangelism, must be our primary emphasis."  Thanks in part to urban mobility, we live in several distinct worlds in the course of a week: office, shop, neighborhood, school, club.  The church is only one world among many for the majority of Christians.  True, the church often brings believers together at other times than Sunday - but usually only the pious few, and then not in a way that encourages koinonia.  The average church has no normative structure for true sharing and fellowship.

    But the mere existence of small groups isn't enough.  Their function must be clearly understood.  If the focus is only personal spiritual growth (which, in part, it surely is), the groups turn inward and become self-defeating.  They must exist for service; they must enable groups for Christian obedience in the world.

    Something happens in a small group that does not happen elsewhere.  George Webber notes in The Congregation in Mission (NY: Abingdon Press, 1964) "People who have listened politely to sermons for years, when they gather together to listen to God's word from the Bible, are most likely to squirm in the face of honest confrontation, and only with difficulty can they brush aside the demands upon their lives."  This awakening may not happen immediately; weeks or months may pass before miracles happen.  We are not prone to bare our souls to people we do not know.  Partially for this reason the small group must be essential church structure, not merely a tentative experiment.  Koinonia is not to be experimented with, but to be experienced.

    The small group also offers some hope of a way through the suffocating institutionalism of the modern church.  Webber again: "The clear demand of mission is that the multiplicity of congregational organizations be eliminated.  A missionary congregation does not need a women's missionary society, but women engaged in mission.  For male fellowship let the men join the Rotary or the union and in that context become salt that preserves the secular structures of community... The small groups in a congregation, along with the vestry, session, or governing board, can manage to fulfill the necessary institutional requirements of the congregation without setting up a host of organizations to fill out a full denominational table of organization for the local church."

    The small group can become basic structure in a local church if there is the vision for it and the will to innovate.  The change cannot come, however,  without rethinking traditional programs and structures.  The midweek prayer meeting (which is woefully unattended anyway) may have to go in favor of a number of midweek small group meetings so that the small groups do not take up another precious weeknight or become something merely tacked on.  Other traditional services and activities may be replaced by small group meetings.  In fact, the whole organization of the church's life may require review.  In short, the small group meeting cannot be part of our church structure, but must be the cornerstone of it.

    The small group is not a panacea.  No human effort can bring the church to greater faithfulness in meeting the needs and problems of its day except as the Holy Spirit directs and infills.  But the small group is an essential component of the church's structure and life, and one that is largely or totally overlooked in today's Western ecclesiology.

    In the early days of the great Wesleyan Revival in England two hundred years ago, John Wesley discovered the importance of the small group for his day.  He instituted small cell groups - class meetings - for the conservation of converts.  Early Methodists thereby discovered the koinonia of the Holy Spirit through the use of small groups.  The wineskins were useful for the wine.

    The Bible does not prescribe any particular pattern of church organization.  But the practical necessities of our day suggest the need for small groups as basic to church structure.

Pax