Episode Details

Before we get started, some news to share: you can now read The Payneful Truth in the new Substack app for iPhone.

With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my newsletter and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never be cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s an upgrade to the reading experience I think.

The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.

Anyway, on to this week’s subject.

Facilitators or teachers?

Is a small group leader a facilitator? Or more of a teacher?

It’s funny how the answer to that question seems to go in cycles.

In the 1980s, most people in my part of the world would have leaned towards ‘facilitator’. The job of the small group leader was not to deliver a mini-sermon or be a ‘teacher’, but to stimulate some discussion around a Bible passage. Get things moving, try to keep it vaguely on track, but don’t feel it’s your responsibility to impose a conclusion or ‘lesson’ on the group.

In the 90s, there was a pendulum swing away from this thinking, as captured in Col Marshall’s classic book Growth Groups. Col argued explicitly against the concept of ‘facilitator’, and trained a generation of small group leaders to think of themselves more as teachers and leaders—as small-p ‘pastors’ who took a measure of responsibility for the spiritual health of the group members. The leader’s job was to help the group learn what the Bible was teaching, not just share opinions with each other. And this required the leader to do sufficient preparation to understand the passage, and to be able to lead a Bible discussion that revealed and applied the passage’s main points.

In the heyday of Growth Groups, it was assumed that most leaders would prepare and write their own Bible studies most of the time.

Was this a high bar for many leaders and churches? No doubt. And perhaps this is why the pendulum has swung back towards ‘facilitation’ in recent years.

The increasingly common pattern today is for small groups either to do some version of the Swedish method together, or to use pre-written studies, often prepared by the church staff in line with the current sermon series. Leaders see themselves more as a chairperson than a teacher. And if there is a conclusion or landing point to get to, it’s the one that’s been given to them by the pre-written study. Small group leaders writing their own Bible studies from scratch now seems to be a rarity.

I am tempted at this point to do a not-in-my-day rant about falling standards.

But perhaps there is something more helpful to say. Let’s think afresh about the pros and cons of each swing of this pendulum.

On the ‘teacher-leader’ side, the main weakness is simply the high expectations it places on the average group leader. This not only makes it harder to find suitable leaders willing and able to embrace the responsibility, but also means that their training takes longer, and that they are more likely to burn out after a few years. Many churches have found that trying to train all their leaders to this level is unrealistic, and places a cap on how many groups can actually be run. How many churches can find space in their program to run the full 10-week Growth Groups training course for their would-be leaders? Not very many.

Then aga