Customer Reviews

Nine Keys to Effective Small Group Leadership

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I am a small-groups person. I have been in one small group or another, often as a leader, almost continually, for the past 30 years. I believe small groups are just about the most important aspect of a church's life.

I have read many books on this, gone to many seminars. There is a lot of good material on this topic.

But in my present role as a church consultant, this is the book on small groups that I hand to pastors who are wanting to know how to grow a small group ministry or how to better equip their small group leaders.

Why? As George explains in this book, most church small groups do a good job of promoting nurture and fellowship, but most stop there. George believes an effective small group should perform three basic functions, not just nurture. In addition to nurture, he believes small groups should be effectively engaged in small-group-based evangelism (George says that in any given year, only one small group in four does any evangelism), and he thinks that small groups should constantly be training small group leaders through apprenticeship. I agree that a small group needs all three functions. And so I use this book as the entry point for someone who is new to these ideas about small group life.

After this introduction, I point churches to further training or more in-depth printed materials about various aspects of this approach to small groups, but in my opinion, there's not a better starting point than this one.

Carl George effectively communicates the essential basics. This book does a good job of highlighting the difference between being a facilitator of small group time and being a leader (someone who is a disciple-maker). I have used this book as the main text for training small group leaders. It provides great material for interactive discussion and presenting a wholistic picture of all that small groups can be.

The best two things about this book are: 1) it helps the small group leader coordinate with the pastor, and 2) it includes shepherding, building community, discipleship and evangelism as part of the small group experience. It is the best balanced book available today!

We have used this tool since it came out. I've found that this tool is best for easily organizing the 'how to' stuff of small group leadership. It does not cover the ministerial philosophy issues. A good book for that is 'Master Plan of Evangelism' by Robert Coleman.

As the title for this book says, it covers nine keys for effective small group leadership. Each key really has four or five sub points...so in reality it is nine times about five...or forty five keys if you will. But George has organized them into nine groups...or keys.

We've found that leaders who study this material are easier to work with and easier to build a vision with for a local church ministry. There are a lot of books on Small Group Leadership that will help you. This one is very practical. It's so well written you can use it even if all you do is read the paragraph headers. Everything is well explained and easy to find or follow.

So even for leaders who don't like to read or who you suspect will not read everything you ask them to read, this book still might get through to them. I recommend it as a curriculum text for a course in a local church/ministry for leading small groups.

Enjoy it!

Nine Keys is a very practical step-by-step process in how to implement successful, healthy small groups into the local church.

This is an excellent resource for church small group members and leaders. I use it in acuainting people to the function and purpose of small groups as well as a training model for facilitators/leaders.

Read anything you can find by Carl George. I believe God is using him to impact the way church will be "done" in the 21st Century